An article published last week in the
Times-Union titled, "
Tarnished Claims From a TV Gold Buyer" captured the essence of what's regularly occurring in the large predatory gold-buying market. A woman sent her old jewelry to a California-based gold buyer and received an offer for only 3% of melt value. When she called their customer service to decline the offer, they immediately counter-offered with a price
eleven times higher. Reluctantly, they sent her gold jewelry back when she declined all of their new offers.
While these stories aren't new, you would think the negative attention would drive some of these buyers out of business. That doesn't appear to be happening. The problem is that many gold sellers don't react the same way this person did, and gladly accept the first offer without protest. Perhaps in their minds, it's just junk laying around and something is better than nothing. Maybe they don't keep up with the current gold price. It's hard for me to understand their reasoning. But it does seem apparent that many people are unknowingly swindled by gold buyers when accepting ridiculously low offers in this unregulated market.
GoldCalc.com is a resource to help sellers understand the value of their scrap gold. It features a calculator defaulting to the live gold price, tips on selling your gold, gram scale and testing kit options, links to credible resources, and an easy-to-use interface. Even if you only possess a common kitchen scale, you can get a rough estimate of how much your gold may be worth.
With this website, a seller can quickly calculate if an offer from a gold buyer is reasonable or not. Since many gold buyers use DWT (the abbreviation for
pennyweight) instead of grams in their offer, DWT is also an option on the calculator.
Please spread the word about GoldCalc.com. If we want to call gold and silver honest money, maybe we can help our neighbors discover the potential value of their own gold. If your local newspaper runs a story about an out-of-town gold buyer setting up shop for the week, consider sending a quick email to the news editor about this site to give balance to their story. Or perhaps write a comment after the story on their website.
Maybe we can make the physical scrap gold market a little more honest.
About The Author:
Alec Nevalainen publishes several websites to help investors price coins and bullion products including Coinflation.com, GoldCalc.com, GoldGramBars.com, and SilverGramBars.com. You can follow Coinflation.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/coinflation.
