How to get top $$ dollar for your gold

How to get top dollar for your gold

Due to a massive rally in precious metals there are now more options to sell your unwanted items than you can count. There are the old traditional jewelry stores, the seedy pawn shop, stand alone gold buying shops and the mail in internet gold buyers.
The best way for you to get the most for your scrap gold is to start with some education. You should first learn how the gold buyers evaluate your items and get a good idea of what you have. First off most gold will have a marking on it to let you know the karat of your item. Take a low power magnifying glass and look for any markings. Understand that 24K gold is solid gold and anything less has alloys in it to make it harder and more lustrous.
If you have a piece of gold marked 14K it is 14/24 parts gold (58.3333% gold). If you have 12K gold it is 12/24 parts gold or 50% gold. You can check on the internet or the paper the prevailing market price for gold. As of the time of this writing gold is about $1,420 per ounce.

The next thing to take a look at is the weight of your items. Simply take an inexpensive postage scale and weigh your items. Set your scale to grams and remember that there are 31.1 grams to a troy ounce.
Now you are armed with the information to estimate the value of your items. If you have 15 grams of 14k gold you have roughly .5 of an ounce of .583333% gold or .5X.583333 of an ounce. This means you have .29165% of an ounce of solid gold or $414 worth of gold. Keep in mind that any gold buyer is not going to pay you full value for your items. They are going to have to pay for their overhead and make a small profit.
Next you should take the time to shop your items around and find out who is paying the highest amount per ounce. The percentage of total value you will be offered will vary greatly from one buyer to the next. This range will go from as little as 15% of the value up to about 80% (don’t trust any gold buyer who won’t tell you what they are paying per gram).
Now take the time to simply call several gold buyers and ask what they are paying per gram. In our experience we have found that pawn shops, and stand alone gold buying businesses pay the least amount. Jewelers and online gold buyers tend to pay the best. This is not a steadfast rule and you should still take the time to call around. And I will not name any names but there are several online gold buyers with very questionable reputations. A simple google search of the company should tell you how many dissatisfied customers there are.
If you decide to us an online gold buyer there are some important things to consider. First and foremost is their reputation. Secondly is how are you paid? Make sure that your online buyer calls or emails you with an offer that you can freely accept or reject (if you reject the offer make sure that you can quickly get your items back at the gold buyer’s expense). Some less reputable gold buyers assume you are accepting the offer and mail you a check. Once you receive the check they make it very difficult to get your items returned if you are not satisfied with the offer.
This article was written by David Eismann
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