Selling your gold Jewellery

Want to sell you old gold Jewellery?

Have you been tempted by one of the many adverts offering to buy your gold jewellery? These companies are all over the place: on TV, in your local shopping center, advertising in magazine and through websites on the internet. They will buy your old gold jewellery for cash, it does not matter what condition the jewellery is in or how old . So you gather up all your old broken gold chains, the rings that have worn thin or the brooch that has gone out of fashion and approach one of these companies. You are astounded at how much money you are offered and accept readily and are quite pleased with the deal. 

There is a problem with all this however, these companies are not quite as generous as they initially seem. Do you know how much money they should have offered you and if you really got a good price?  Here is how they value your gold and a quick guide to working out how much they should have offered you. All your jewellery is valued as scrap even though much of it can be sold as antique or vintage jewellery at a higher price.

vintage gold jewellery

How scrap gold jewellery is valued:

These gold buying companies weigh you gold and offer you a price per gram depending on what carat purity your gold is. Gold has gone up in price so much recently that we are all surprised at what they offer us.  Gold price varies from day to day, its a bit like the stock market going up and down all the time but whilst stocks have fallen recently gold prices have rocketed.

Looking around the websites of the companies buying gold today I see some are offering to buy nine carat gold for about £7.65 per gram and eighteen carat for twice that price.  At least these companies are honest and telling you up front what they will pay. Many more of these websites will not give you a figure up front. You just send them the gold and wait and see how much turns up. Hmmm- not enough I suspect.

A little experiment

I tried a little experiament  and approached one of the companies sitting in a shopping center waiting to buy gold. What would they offer me for my broken gold chain?  I was astounded at how little they were paying – about £5 a gram for hallmarked nine carat – I should think not!

Getting a fair price

We all appreciate that the gold buying companies are entitled to a fair profit – they do provide a way for folks with a small amount of gold to turn it into cash and therefore should not be paying the full scrap gold price . Now you know how scrap gold is priced you can shop around and make sure that you get a fair price for your old gold jewellery.

A word of caution

Gold prices are changing regularly. Please do not rely on any values quoted in this article for the actual value of gold today – you will need to research that close to the time you wish to sell your jewellery. And no I do not buy scrap jewellery so please dont offer it to me.