People sell gold jewelry for all kinds of reasons: whether it’s to make some quick cash to buy that new item you’ve had your eye on, to get rid of some old/broken jewelry filling up your jewelry box, or even just to pay bills . Which means that there is always a strong market for gold and even more so right now. But how do you actually go about selling your gold? Well if you have gold jewelry one of the first places you should check out is your local jewelry shop.
There are advertisements everywhere for selling gold – all of them trying to get you to sell your gold jewelry to them. Most of these are gold refiners which only pay you based on the gold content in your item. Also many online refiners will try to rip you off unless you can find a legitimate one. Which is why a jeweler is often times the better choice.
Online generally isn’t the best place to find jewelers to sell you precious jewelry to. Your local yellow pages are almost always the better place to find local jewelry stores. Jewelry shops will buy your broken, old or even antique jewelry for partial retail value. Sometime they will base the price solely on the gold content like many gold refiners but that is if the piece cannot be resold as is and/or is not valuable. The best way to find out if your gold jewelry has any value is to shop around at some different stores to get the piece appraised.
If you want to get a good price for your piece or pieces of jewelry you need to understand how the gold of your jewelry is valued. Karats are what determine how much gold is in a said item. 24 karats would be pure gold and anything under that is less gold and more alloys and hardening agents. The gold content of your piece is probably inscribed on it somewhere in karats. Rings will usually have them on the inside of the band somewhere and bracelets the same.
Antique or well-crafted pieces of jewelry are usually the best items to sell to jewelers as they are more likely to give you the better price. Everyone else only looks at the gold content of the item and does not consider the retail value. This is because refiners just smelt down all the pieces but jewelers can resell your piece without modification generally.