A couple of months ago, I took my wife’s old jewelry to a store in the big city and turned it into cash. My neighbor went with me, and he cashed in 100 silver eagles. He needed the money to repair his car.
I guess my wife must have told her girlfriends, because one woman (we’ll call her Lucy) asked her for the name of the store I went to. I gave her the names of both the pawnshop I had been to before and the local coin store we went to most recently. Then I volunteered that if she came over, I would help her identify how many karats her items were and how much she should expect for them. She thanked us, and that was the end of it, or so I thought.
Then, just as I got out of the shower one morning last week, my wife said Lucy wanted to know when I could help her weigh her gold that day. I had been planning to go to the barbershop and run some errands, so I said, “Today at 10 a.m., or after 3 p.m.” She came over at 10, right after I finished my morning chores.
Testing the Gold
The problem with gold jewelry is that it can be difficult for the layman to identify jewelry that looks golden versus jewelry that has gold in it. I have a rare-earth magnet that is very useful for separating the ferrous metals from the non-ferrous. Generally speaking, if a “gold” chain sticks to the magnet, it is gold plated, and the gold content is so minimal no one will buy it from you. So we used the magnet to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
The next item I use is a jeweler’s loop. Mine is a 10x loop, which allows me to read the tiny print on the inside of rings, on the clasps or necklaces and bracelets, etc. This allowed us to separate the 14-karat gold from the 10-karat gold. She had no 18-karat gold.
I use an inexpensive digital scale that reads in grams. After I weigh an item, I enter the weight in grams under the slot for 14 karat on a gold scrap app on my phone, and it tells me the value. I then write that down. Lucy had one rather ugly charm bracelet she had inherited that weighed more than 64 grams. It alone was worth more than $4,000.
We ended up with two items we thought were gold but did not have a clear indication of what karat they were, and another bracelet that we did not think was gold, but did not stick to the magnet. She left with a baggie of 14-karat gold, one of 10-karat gold, a baggie of unknown and a baggie that was probably not gold. I also calculated the true value and then gave her the 80 percent and 70 percent figures.
The Total
I told her she should expect between $6,000 and $8,000, depending on the rate the store paid and whether the unknown items had gold in them. Then I went off to the barbershop, gun store, Lowe’s and Harbor Freight. By the time I got home, Lucy had already cashed in her gold and been paid $7,500. She went straight to the bank and deposited the cash.
She timed her trip well because gold was $4,200 an ounce and the price dropped the next day.
Lucy reported that having the gold separated by karat and knowing the weight and price made her look like she knew what she was doing. She felt confident that she would not be ripped off. Having everything sorted also made the process at the pawnshop go faster. We were also correct in that the items we thought were gold were indeed gold, and the item we were not sure about was not.
If you want to do something similar with old or broken jewelry, you can get the supplies I mentioned above for less than $40 on Amazon.com. The app I use is free. Things like the magnet and the loop can also help you identify gold jewelry at yard sales or estate sales.
If you use a metal detector, buy abandoned storage units, or clean out houses for banks or realtors, you may find jewelry that has some value. Just test it out and cash it in. You may not get $7,500, but even $750 is a nice haul.
