What is a fair price for my gold?

The gold market on the news, or on the Internet, is the price used by banks, governments and other large traders to exchange hundreds of thousands of ounces in daily trades of pure gold in the form of gold bars or financial instruments.

The rest of us use those prices as reference points to set prices to buy or sell gold in less pure forms and much smaller quantities. When you buy a piece of jewellery at a jeweller, you will typically pay 6 to 10 times the market value of the gold because someone had to make the jewellery and sell it to the store, then the store has costs and everyone needs to make a living.

When you are selling a piece of jewellery at the end of its useful life you can expect to get somewhat less than the intrinsic value of the gold, because the quantity is small and the gold is not pure. The question is: how much less and what is fair?

For most jewellery a good dealer will pay about 75% of the intrinsic gold value. You may get a little less if the piece is very low karat like 8 or 9 karat which is less than 1/3 gold, and you may get more if the piece is high karat like 22 karat which is over 90% gold.

Pure gold bars typically attract 90% or even 95% of their intrinsic gold value, because they are pure and there will be no refinery costs.