Businesses that offer to cash for gold base their purchases on several different factors. If you have gold to sell, here's what will likely influence how much you get for your pieces.
The Gold Content of Your Pieces
Although jewelry and other items might be thought of as gold, they're not pure gold. Gold is too soft of a metal to be used by itself in pieces, so it's commonly combined with other metals that are more durable. Unless you're selling from-the-mint pure gold bars or coins, there's almost certainly some other metals in your items.
Thus, the amount of actual gold in your pieces has a significant impact on their value. The amount is noted through a rating system that uses either karats (in the United States) or a percentage (in Europe).
Items made and initially sold in the U.S. may be rated as 14 karat (14k), 18 karat (18k) or 24 karat (24k), or some other number of karats. These figures are set throughout the industry, so 14 karat pieces contain the same amount of pure gold no matter what company made the items. The higher the number is, the more gold there is in the piece.
Items made and initially sold in Europe tend to express the gold percent as a decimal. Thus, a piece that's 58.3 percent gold would be marked with .583. Of course, higher percentages equate to greater value because they have more gold.
The Weight of Your Pieces
Once the gold rating is known, the true amount of gold in a piece can be determined by weighing the item. For example, assume you have a piece that's 58.3 percent gold. If the piece weighs 15 grams, there will be 8.745 grams of gold in the item. Naturally, the heavier an item is, the more gold it will have.
The Current Price of Gold
With the exact amount of gold determined, the next step is to figure out how much that gold is worth. To do this, you can simply multiply the amount of gold by the going price for gold at the time of sale. If gold is selling for $50 per gram when you sell that 15-gram piece, the gold content in it would be worth $437.25 (not all of the piece is gold, remember).
The Business's Costs
This doesn't mean that you'll receive a full $437.25 for the hypothetical gold piece in the example, however. This is how much the business paying cash for your gold can get. From this, the business has to cover the cost of melting the gold down and running its operations. Thus, you can expect an offer that's some percentage of this price.
Share21 March 2020
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