So you want to sell gold in Houston, but you’re worried about getting the best price? We get that. That’s why we started Houston Gold Merchants.
It shouldn’t be a big secret and you shouldn’t have to know someone in the business to get a good deal – like when you buy a car…”Hey, I gotta a cousin – he can get you a good deal (in a Brooklyn accent) That’s crazy.
It’s basically a math problem…so here’s the math on selling gold.
Gold is bought and sold in grams (because it’s so expensive). If someone quotes you a gold price in pennyweight, just leave their store. They’re scamming you. What’s a pennyweight? Any idea? Of course, not. It’s only used by refiners and you don’t need to put up with anyone who’s trying to pull a fast one and confuse you by using a refiner’s measurement. Just ask for the quote in grams…they’ll either continue to try to scam you or they’ll realize you’re smarter than the average customer.
So let’s take the normal measurement, grams – and figure out how many are in an ounce. Of course, metal is measured in ounces called “troy” ounces, which differ slightly from avoir dupois ounces…(which can be used to measure flour and ingredients for cookies!!) Yum. Who doesn’t love cookies. But stay focused here…we’re talking troy ounces…and the number of grams in a troy ounce is 31.1…
With that information you can take the price of a pure ounce of gold, (which is 1744 at this writing) and divide it by 31.1…you’ll get about $56.07…that’s the price of a gram of pure gold, where you pay nobody any amount of money during the transaction. And there’s almost never going to be a transaction that you don’t have to pay for, so expect to pay at least something to the guy who buys it from you…unless he wants it more than you want to sell it and then maybe YOU make the money…but in normal world, you pay to sell your gold…OK? Let’s more on…
That’s the price for pure gold. But you probably don’t have pure gold. You probably have 14 karat gold…14 karat gold is 58.5% gold and the rest of the piece is silver and copper and tin…so there are some other metals in most jewelry to make it easier to work with and to harden it a little since gold is so soft…
So we take that first number, the 56.07 number which was the price of pure gold by the gram and we multiply it by .585, the result then is 32.80 which is the price for a single gram of 14 karat gold…so if you go to a gold buyer in Houston, you’ll probably get some amount that is this price MINUS their fee…and here’s where things get dicey. Some gold buyers in Houston, (the big chain, with over 100 stores) pay 45-55 cents on the dollar…meaning of the $32.80, you’ll get $16. That’s no good.
But at my store we pay everyone at 70% and then we go up from there if you have more gold. So in this case, you’d get almost $23 for each gram of 14 karat gold you had.
The math works for 10 karat as well…I’ll show you how to do that in a later post…
