Gold: A good choice?

When I told my friend that in my bank account my money is only enough to live for two weeks, he laugh and called me big fat liar. After I show him my account print out he surprised and ask me whether I was broke and need some loan from him. I explain to him that I take most of my money from the bank and I buy a few grams of gold. The argumentation then started because most of the time he put all of his income in the bank and so far he felt nothing goes wrong.  He got good interest, bonuses, etc, etc.. and his money amount is getting bigger each year. Yes, nothing to complaint about.


Well, not only my friend that will think exactly the same, perhaps you has similar opinion. My questions are how much interest you get from the bank? 5% - 6% per year?? How much they take for administration fee? tax? insurance? etc..etc.. The most important after all of that is how much is the country's inflation rate that year?


For example the 2008 inflation rate is around 11,06 % in my country, In 2005 the rate is even worse 17, 11% . In 2009 and 2010 the inflation is only around 2%  SOURCE. In overall,  how much is the total  inflation  in - let's say - 5 or 10 years???
All of us can see that it seems that our money in the bank is getting bigger but actually the value of our money is getting smaller and most of us we didn't aware of that.


Now let us see the table below, This table is the gold price in 2005 (table 1) and gold price in 2010 (table 2) provided by the trusted one kitco.com

Table 1. Gold Price 2005

Table 2. Gold price 2010

Source Kitco.com

Let us compare the average Gold Price on June, 2005 and June 2010. The data shows that on June 2010 the average gold price reach US$ 430,66 per ounce at the same month in 2010,  it reach US$ 1232,92 per ounce or increase around 287% in 5 years! 


So my final question is: can your bank give you 287% interest in 5 years? :)