If you need cash and you have jewellery you no longer need, you should consider selling. This precious metal offers more value than other investment assets and itis less volatile. But first, there are a couple of things you need to do before you approach any gold buyerswith gold you’d like to sell.
- How is gold valued
The value of you gold jewellery will depend on how much hold is in each piece. This means you would need to weigh the gold. However the weight of gold is expressed in troy ounce. A regular ounce is equal to 28 grams but a troy ounce is equal to 31.1 grams. Gold is also measured in pennyweight. A pennyweight equals 1.555 grams.The price of gold that is published in the business section of your newspaper or on any gold site will most likely be in troy ounces, so do some mathsand convert what your scale gives you to Troy ounces.
- Find out the quality of your gold in karats
Pure gold is soft and extremely malleable. The unit used to express the quality is a karat. Pure gold is equal to 24 karats. Because of its softness, pure gold is not durable enough to be used in making jewellery, watches and other things. It is often combined with other alloys to strengthen it and make it more durable. A single karat equals to 1/24 pure gold. A 14 karat piece of gold contains 14 parts gold and 10 parts other metals. Most jewellery is made up of 14 karat gold. Check what karat your jewellery is made of.
- Check the spot price of gold
When you sell your gold, you should have it valued. When you do this make sure that you know what the spot price of gold is on a particular day. Make a note of this so that you can verify any information provided by the gold buyer to ensure they are offering you a fair price. You can also visit several gold buyers to get different gold estimates.
Now that you have weighed your gold, know the karat and checked the market or spot price of gold, how can you work out what the price of you gold will be?
Let’s use an example to illustrate:
Your 14k gold chain weighs 10grams.
1 Troy Oz.= 31.1 grams then your necklace weighs 0.321 troy ounces.
A 14k gold piece of jewellery is made up of 58.33% pure gold (14/24 x100) the rest is other metals.
Now taking the weight of the piece and the percentage of pure gold that is in the jewellerythen you have (0.321 X 0.5833) =0.187 Troy ounce of pure gold.
If the price of gold is $1,800/Troy ounce then that mean your gold should be worth $336.60.
That’s the bit of maths you might have to do or you could take the easy way out and simply use one of the many gold calculators online to find out what your 10g gold piece is worth. Keep in mind thatjewellers charge for their labor to manufacture jewellery, thereforegold buyers can only pay you the gold value for your gold jewellery. If you receive 90% of the gold value then you are getting a good deal
When you are looking to sell, prioritise gold buyers with a good reputation and online reviews. If your jewellery has other valuable elements like diamonds, find out if the buyer will pay you for these or not. If not, remove these stones and try selling them to a jeweller who might have better use for them.
