Rob3020

Just to let you know, to try to resolve the issues that are causing problems in the mentioned topic below, that sometime this week we are planning to put the forum into offline mode to overhaul everything and hopefully fix it.
So the forum will be down for an extended period sometime this week, which may be a few days. (This is to avoid data being lost in the transfer)
We apologise in advance for this downtime and hope that we are able to permanently resolve the issues on the server this week.
EDIT: Work may begin from tonight. We apologise in advance for the downtime but this is needed to try to rectify the issues causing this. Hopefully it will be fixed within 2-3 days Max. (The forum is quite large so moving all of the files over will take some time)

Apologies for the down time earlier.

There seemed to be multiple back end issues, which caused some errors on the forum. All of which were not showing error logs, so it was difficult to locate.

The errors included but where not limited to; a backup of the forum upload files which was saved on the same drive had caused that drive to become full and subsequently the forum was inaccessible as it had ran out of space. This is despite the massive storage space that we have. We have now deleted those extra unnecessary files, as we have actual back up files on other hard drives on the sever.

There is currently plenty of space, but we will be upgrading the storage space at some point to prevent any future outage. There may therefore be some downtime sometime in the near future when we upgrade the space on the drives. If you currently use the forum for free, please consider upgrading to Premium Membership as this helps a lot with maintenance costs of the forum. Thank you to those who choose to use TSF as a Premium Member and who help to maintain the forum. 

There is also a caching based issue, which we are working on. So there may be some sporadic downtime later as we are trying to re-enable a different caching method.

Once again, sorry for the downtime earlier and glad that we should now be back up and running as usual  

This post is designed to help those members in the UK who are buying gold from other members, either importing from the EU to the UK or from outside the EU to the UK

There are a lot of gold coins that are considered investment gold and therefore VAT exempt. There may therefore be opportunities for UK members to buy from the EU or other markets.
 
Using a Sovereign as an example, our understanding of the definition "is of a description of coin that is normally sold at a price that does not exceed 180% of the open market value of the gold contained in the coin" from information taken from UK dealers is that any sovereign, even those that sell for 10's of thousands of pounds do not attract any import VAT as a sovereign in general sells for not more than 180% of the spot price of gold.

The full information on what gold coins and type of other investment gold except can be found from the following link: 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/investment-gold-coins-and-vat-notice-70121a

Please also note that members may have experienced VAT incorrectly being added to gold imports into the UK, due to the description used by the sender. If VAT is incorrectly added you can usually claim back the full VAT (I have done this myself) however the courier admin charge (around £8 Royal Mail, and around £11 for other couriers like UPS, is not always claimable back, this depends on the reason why the incorrect VAT was applied) 

This post is correct as far as our knowledge at the time of writing. It should not be constituted as legal or tax advise, members have the responsibility to do their own research and speak with any necessary advisers. TSF can not be held liable for any incorrect VAT that is applied by HMRC or any other import or taxes that are charged due to any purchases by members whatsoever. 

Please check the government website, or start a topic in the discussion area of the forum if you would like to ask members questions and hopefully the TSF community can help. There are likely a lot of members who have experience of buying gold from abroad and can help   


Items are listed in the regions they are located in. So UK members wishing to see items available internationally please see some of the below sections:

See the items listed in the EU trade section, lots of members will ship to UK

See the items listed in the USA & Canada section, many members are also willing to ship worldwide.

A full list of all trade sections on the forum can be found here

Yes please.