Lear Capital Company Overview
Lear Capital Inc. (Lear Capital) is a brokerage of precious metals, established by Kevin DeMieritt in 1997 and headquartered in Los Angeles. The company provides three major services: founding precious metals IRAs for clients, direct selling of precious metals, and purchasing gold and silver coins from eager retail merchandisers.
Lear Capital charges its customers $160 for arranging a precious metals IRA. This amount is actually cheaper than the industry average of $250, which started back in 1859. Full insurance is provided to all precious metals under a comprehensive policy indemnified by Lloyds of London. Currently, its main customers are mainly composed of retail investors.
This precious metal brokerage is also an authorized dealer of a Professional Coin Grading Service, which allows the company to offer its consumers grading precision and authenticity services.
Competitive Advantage
Lear Capital strives to be an expert and a transparent one-stop centre for all its potential customers’ needs. It takes pride in its 3-step Price Advantage Guarantee transactions, which composed of the following: Written Account Agreement, Phone Confirmation, and Written Confirmation.
Its consumer education section is very detailed as it includes the regular economic news blogs in addition to informational videos and articles. Customers are also given a choice to receive newsletters and guides via mail. An ‘Ask Scott’ section is also maintained to allow people to ask questions directly to the CEO, Scott Carter; answered queries are also posted in this section. Likewise, Scott usually features on most of its informational videos on the website.
The website also features a portfolio comparison calculator and required minimum distribution estimator to aid potential investors in creating the essential computations. Moreover, the site also provides a premium coin analyzer tool for customers to know the estimated value of possessed Lear Capital gold coins.
Available Products
- Gold and silver coins (old and IRA-eligible)
- Gold and silver IRAs
Extra Value-Added Services
- Portfolio comparison calculator
- Required minimum distribution estimator
- Premium coin analyzer
- Historical charts plus current market price for gold, silver, platinum, and palladium
- Direct email and phone support
Education Resources
- Precious metal news blog
- Precious metals encyclopedia
- Ask Scott section
- Various videos and articles on the economy and precious metal investing
Consumer Protection Trust Factors
BBB Complaints: 38
BBB Rating: A+
TrustLink Rating: 4.5 (based on 321 reviews)
BCA Complaints: 4
BCA Rating: AAA
Online Community and Support
Company Website: Information And Convenience
The website of Lear Capital has a contemporary appearance and is quite easy to use. The color scheme is pleasant to the eye and visitors will be able to navigate the site sections using the header and footer columns. However, the site’s front page is too crowded and heavy with marketing, which is regrettably common with a lot of current business websites today. Although the subpages don’t have an overcrowded appearance, there is an insistent pop-up request to subscribe all the time; another annoying feature offered with a lot of current websites.
Even so, there is a very high amount of information available on the site, but fortunately for Lear Capital, they’re able to organize the information in the most accessible manner. Their consumer education section is so comprehensive that it needs to be spread out over the whole site. This can be slightly a challenge to look for the precise educational section you’re searching for.
Overall, Lear Capital’s site is aesthetically good despite the overcrowded front page and annoying pop-ups. With its great categorization, the site is fairly easy to navigate despite the high volume of information contained therein. For those wanting to assess Lear’s service offerings, the site delivers all information needed.
In Conclusion
Lear Capital is truly a contemporary company that knows how to market and advertise its own services. This is manifested by the rather high volume of complaints on the Better Business Bureau, and we emphasize that 11 have been successfully resolved out of the 36 complaints. When a firm advertises and markets itself too much, you’ll expect a high number of complaints to happen. Potential consumers would be smart to do essential due diligence before creating any solid investment decisions. Even so, the overall customer satisfaction seems to be satisfactory and the company’s website has a store of valuable data that customers can take benefit of to educate themselves on precious metal investing. This is regardless if they end up investing in the Lear Capital or not.