Monthly Aquisition Plan Update

Revised Terms & Conditions - November 2012

Dear Friends,

In 1981 we began offering the Monthly Acquisition Plan (MAP). We set a low $100.00 minimum (inflation adjusted to 2012, that’s $254.47 today) because everyone—not just those able to meet several thousand dollar order minimums—should be able to hold real money.

But then there’s the Post Office. During the MAP’s 30+ year tenure, we have struggled to keep shipping costs as close as possible to Post Office minimums so that you aren’t forced to spend your savings merely to get your order to your door. We accomplished this mainly by sending orders valued under $1,000 by “insured mail,” rather than more expensive registered mail.

Then the Post Office, without any notice, began changing the rules. In May 2010, the month they stopped requiring that someone sign for packages insured for under $201, we lost two packages that cost us $400. We had to begin insuring even $100 value packages for at least $201 so we could be sure they arrived.  More cost to you, but no other solution.

Now, again without warning, the Post Office has made another and more damaging change. In September of this year, one of our “insured mail” MAP shipments, valued at $1,000, went missing. Over the course of several weeks we and our customer spent tiresome hours on the phone with many postal workers, to no avail. To this day the missing package appears forever lost. In early October we decided to cut our losses and re-send our customer’s order via registered mail (which arrived without incident) and file a claim for the lost package. Early this month we finally received a formal reply from the Post Office.

Their letter informed us that they no longer pay insurance claims on packages shipped insured mail that contain gold, silver, or currency. For a $1,000 claim, they paid us $16.95.

What can we do? We can only guarantee insurance by shipping all MAP orders via registered mail with postal insurance. This will cost more—$20.00 per order valued under $500.00, $22.50 for values between $500 and $1,000, $25 for values $1,000 to $2,000, and $35 for orders valued over $2,000.

It’s simply not reasonable that you spend 20% of your $100 order on shipping. It grieves us, but the only solution we see is to raise our MAP order minimum to $300.

The MAP will still operate as a monthly program, and the form will be the same. However, our new minimum order must be $300.00. This way your shipping cost will be $6.67 per $100.00 on $300.00 order. For smaller orders, this will actually decrease shipping costs.

Your options are twofold:

  1. Raise your minimum order to $300 (perhaps by saving $100 a month for three months and then entering a MAP order), or
  2. Buy from a local coin dealer every month for less than $300. Yes, we know they charge much more than we do. Yes, we know they don’t carry the least expensive gold coins. But we don’t want shipping costs to eat up your purchase, either.

In 1981 I began the Monthly Acquisition Plan because I wanted to offer a regular gold and silver savings plan for people who weren’t rich. We still want to do that, but for your sake we simply cannot swallow these high transaction costs, so we must raise our monthly minimum purchase to three hundred dollars ($300).

If you have any questions, please write or call anytime.

Best wishes,

Franklin Sanders