subject: Selling Scrap Gold Versus Antique Gold [print this page] Many people have old jewelry that are made from precious metals. Often, these items are out of fashion, or perhaps broken and not worth the time and effort to repair. Jewelry like this tends to sit around in the bottom of drawers, clearly forgotten. You might wonder who would even want to buy all this junk and if it would even be worth selling.
Well, the good news is that gold always retains it's value as a precious metal and any gold object can be melted down and then made into something else, even if it is just scrap gold in it's current form. This is exactly what happens today with scrap gold consisting of old gold jewelery, coins, and other gold items - a jeweler will buy the scrap gold, melt it down, and then use it to make something else.
Since gold & other precious metals always have value (although the value of precious metals is constantly fluctuating), it makes sense for a jeweler to buy old gold & re-use it.
Some people also buy scrap gold as an investment since they can buy it at very close to the official gold price (the spot price), without much, if any, premium - gold coins have a value to coin collectors, and so usually carry a premium above the gold spot price making scrap gold quite attractive to investors who think the price of gold is going up.
If you want to sell your items in a hurry, you can go to a local jeweler. Some actually will turn around and melt it down into something else, and others will sell it off to a scarp gold broker themselves. However, most jewelers are not in the business of buying gold like that.
If your items are outdated and they can't repair and resell them, they may not even want to bother. Probably the best way to sell your scrap gold quickly and to get a better price too is to use one of the online dealers, but again you must be careful since you will be posting your gold to someone you've never met & can't easily visit - how do you know who they really are?
If you don't need to sell your scrap gold right away then you could always put it into an online auction Online auctions always seem to realize a fair price, so long as you describe what you have accurately, including an accurate weight (with stones and other none gold fittings removed), take good clear photographs, and remember to take auction fees into account, then you should do okay.
The price that you'll get for your scrap gold is determined by a number of factors, including whether your gold is 9ct, 14ct, 18ct, 22ct, or 24ct, what the current price of gold is, and of course how much the dealer in question is offering for different grades of gold.
In general you will find that dealers will offer you between 80% and 95% of the intrinsic value of the scrap gold, since they have to then incur costs while melting it down & reworking it. Perhaps this is why high street jewelers offer so much less for old gold, since they also have shop overheads to cover too.
There are many online resources to help you figure out the value of your gold by weight and carat. You might even have antique gold that you'd like to make some money from. One final thought is that if you have an antique made from gold, like maybe an old gold watch that has stopped working, a broken gold necklace, etc, it may well be worth considerably more than the scrap gold value.
If your antique gold object turns out to be have been made by a desirable maker like a Faberge or Cartier, or to be a rare example, then it's price may far exceed the gold content value, and it may be a very good idea to get it repaired.
You can get a good idea of the age of the item, and hopefully the maker by looking at the hallmarks, which will identify it exactly. There are lots of excellent websites that you can identify hallmarks on, and you could then research the maker before selling.
If in doubt, consult a good specialist antiques dealer first, they don't mind and you may get a better offer from them, and cash on the spot, than you'll get from a scrap gold merchant. So if you have antique gold, you may not want to sell it as scrap. Your otherwise old and outdated jewelry however, would be very good to sell as scrap and make a few bucks on.
