Buying gold at a "local" dealer

[Tortoise]

Oddly enough, CNI is one of my local coin dealers since I live in the Los Angeles area. I've bought from them in person several times. I like doing business with them, but they aren't located in the best neighborhood (you may have heard Inglewood mentioned in various gangsta rap songs).

There's another local dealer I have bought from once or twice. They seem not to know their stuff nearly as well as the CNI guys (one of their young new-hires didn't even know what a Canadian Maple Leaf was when I asked for one), and their bid-ask spreads are a bit higher, but I actually prefer them over CNI since they're located in a much better neighborhood. I view the higher spreads as the cost of avoiding getting shot in a drive-by

If you live in a decent-sized city, I think you should be able to shop around and find one or two local coin dealers with prices in the same ballpark as CNI.

[bigamish]

I have several options in the Atlanta-metro area, ranging from outrageously marked up to fairly reasonable (~5-6% above spot).  However, the local monthly coin show is where I get the absolute best deals.  The local dealers that come to those shows lower their mark-up by 1-2% due to all of the concentrated competition.

If you live in Southern NH (or near Portsmouth) I suspect that you will have a number of reasonably close options available.  You might need to hop over the border to Boston (as you say), but it isn't that far.

As an aside, I really miss living in the Granite State.  Used to live in Stoddard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoddard,_New_Hampshire) until my job situation brought me south.

[smurff]

Desert, there is a company online, www.mintproducts.com, that sells precious metals along with other coins and supplies.  They've been online for 12 years, and the owner has been a coin dealer for 30 years.  They're in Bedford, NH.  You might contact them (toll-free number at their site) to see if they offer a storefront where you could do business in person.

[Lone Wolf]

I'd say that it's definitely worth calling around to your local coin shops and seeing what they can do for you.  I found one or two that usually offer bullion in the 3-4% markup range, with occasionally <3% markup.

Plus, it is just a lot of fun to spend a few minutes in a nice coin shop.  Looking at wall after wall papered with now-vanished fiat currencies really focuses the mind to buy some "real money".    It's fun to rap a bit with the shop owners, too.

Lately, supply has been a bit of an issue at the local shops, though, so I've had to stick with mail order.

[smurff]

Desert, there is a company online, www.mintproducts.com, that sells precious metals along with other coins and supplies.  They've been online for 12 years, and the owner has been a coin dealer for 30 years.  They're in Bedford, NH.  You might contact them (toll-free number at their site) to see if they offer a storefront where you could do business in person.

Thanks for the info, I will contact them.  Their online prices look very high: $1720 for a Gold Eagle, compared with $1640 at CNI.

Some of that's because they accept Visa and Mastercard for online sales (and at one time accepted American Express, but I think they've stopped that--too expensive).  I think they also have some sort of supply/demand system going, where the price is based on the real-time gold/silver prices, along with some multiplier to account for the huge demand for Gold Eagles compared to, say, Kruggerands or Gold Maple Leafs.  When I checked their prices for Gold Maple Leafs, they were more in line with those you quoted for CNI.

I don't know how their prices would run if they had a storefront.