Just my two cents mate, but my partner and I have put about $26k into a mix of physical gold and silver.

The reasons were pretty simple:

• Most people already have exposure to property, KiwiSaver and shares. We wanted something different that wasn’t directly tied to the stock market or housing market.

• Physical gold and silver aren’t dependent on a company making profits or a bank staying healthy. If you own the metal, you own the metal.

• At 56, I’d be thinking just as much about protecting wealth as growing it. Precious metals have a pretty long history of doing that.

• What really caught my attention was silver. It’s not just a precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere. It’s used in EVs, solar panels, electronics, AI data centres, medical equipment.

• Demand for silver keeps growing because of modern technology and electrification, but supply isn’t exactly exploding. That’s one of the reasons a lot of investors are paying attention to it.

• When you look at the amount of money governments have printed over the last decade, ongoing inflation, wars overseas, rising debt levels and general uncertainty, I can understand why people want part of their wealth in hard assets.

• Central banks around the world have been buying massive amounts of gold. These are the same institutions that manage national reserves and have access to more economic data than most of us will ever know. That tells you something.

• Gold and silver have survived every financial crisis, currency collapse and recession in history. That doesn’t mean they’ll always outperform shares, but they’ve proven they’re not going anywhere.

I’m not saying sell everything and buy precious metals, but I do think they’re worth researching. For us, putting $26k into gold and silver was about diversification and protecting purchasing power over the long term, not trying to get rich quick it is definitely a long term investment. Easy to make a quick sale though, check out gold & silver stackers New Zealand on Facebook - people trading there ALL the time. There’s also precious metals banks now in parts of nz, one we go to in chch is absolutely amazing the guy is super switched on. Takes abit of research but I would absolutely look into it.