Personal Finance

That's... just not true. Gold fluctuates quite a bit. Check out this site and put it at 15 years, you'll see a period from 2013 to 2016 where it consistently lost value relative to the US dollar. It's a speculative investment.

If you want something that doesn't lose value to inflation, look at treasuries. I-bonds are the "best" here because they match exactly the government's inflation number, but they're limited to $10k/SSN/year. Or you can get t-bills, which aren't guaranteed to match inflation, but they are usually somewhat close. Or get TIPS, which track inflation, but work a bit differently.

But that's solving the wrong problem. For retirement, you want growth, not value protection. Check out this graph of the S&P 500 vs gold value. Play with the numbers, and you'll see that, over any interesting term, stocks outperform gold. So don't but gold, buy a diversified portfolio of stocks (e.g. an S&P 500 fund is a good option). Stocks will fluctuate more than gold (in most cases), so you may want to buy a more stable investment to help level out the growth. Most people use bonds for this, but if you like gold, you can have a little gold of you like as well. If you're risk averse (i.e. you're likely to sell if your portfolio drops significantly in value), so something like 60% S&P 500, 30% bond fund, and 10% gold (again, if you like gold, otherwise just increase the bond position).