My initial thought was to buy my wife gold jewelery so that she would have an investment in gold that we could cash in someday if things got hard enough.  After several years of this I realized that my investments were making two people very happy;  my wife and the jeweler that was designing the jewelery.  Most of the money was going to pay for his workmanship and that would probably not translate to cash if and when the time came to sell them.   Now I have started to buy gold coins.  The gold is real,  the gold is valuable,  and its value will never fall below the face value of the coin.