14-karat yellow gold bangle bracelet
How to Value Your 14-Karat Gold
Before selling your jewelry, you need to know how much money you can realistically expect to get for it.
To estimate a reasonable price for your 14K gold pieces, you need to weigh them, determine how much of that weight is pure gold, and value it at the appropriate price.
Weigh Your Gold Jewelry
First, weigh your jewelry on a scale, and write down the weight in ounces or grams.
If there are any diamonds or other gemstones in your jewelry, do not weigh them. It’s better to either remove them beforehand or subtract their weight afterwards, if it is known.
Determine the Gold Purity of Your Jewelry
To find out how much of the weight of your 14K jewelry is actually pure gold, you need to convert the karats of the items to a percentage.
This is easy: Since your pieces are 14 karats, this means that they contain 14 parts pure gold out of a total of 24 parts.
So, just divide 14 by 24 and multiply the result by 100 to obtain the gold purity percentage of your items, which turns out to be 58.3%.
Calculate the Gold Content of Your 14-Karat Gold
Now that you know the gold purity percentage of your items, you just need to multiply it by their weight. For example, if your 14-karat gold jewelry weighs 9 grams, then it contains about 5.25 grams pure gold (9 g x 58.3%).
Value Your 14K Gold Jewelry
Finally, you need to find out the price of gold and use it to value your jewelry.
You can easily find gold prices online, but those that are quoted for gold traded on international exchanges won’t be of much use to you, as you won’t get the same price when selling your gold.
The prices you should check are those quoted by gold dealers. See how much they buy gold for, per ounce or gram, and calculate how much you could get for the amount of gold you have.
Please note that this is a baseline estimate: It tells you how much you would get if you sold your 14-karat jewelry for scrap gold. Depending on who buys your pieces, you might be able to negotiate for more.
Finding a Buyer for 14-Karat Gold Jewelry
When you have some idea of how much your 14K gold is worth, it’s time to look for potential buyers. Here are the most common ones:
Gold Dealers
These buyers will buy your 14K jewelry for scrap gold. This means that they will value it depending on the current prices of the precious metal.
Gold dealers buy jewelry to melt it or sell it to buyers who will extract the gold themselves. Therefore, with them, you shouldn’t expect to get a price that is even close to the retail price of your jewelry.
Jewelry Retail Stores
Retailers sometimes buy gold jewelry, but not always. If they do, they usually pay a price that is close to the gold dealers’ quotes.
Many jewelers, however, will not offer you cash for used jewelry, but they could agree to an exchange deal: If you buy a new piece of jewelry, the value of your used gold jewelry will be counted towards the purchase.
Depending on how the jewelers at the store value your 14-karat pieces, this deal may turn out to be better value compared with gold dealers’ offers.
Individual Buyers
You can always try selling your 14-karat gold jewelry to individual buyers, and the most straightforward way to do so is online. There are websites where you can auction your jewelry and wait for potential buyers to bid.
You might be able to get a better price for your jewelry this way than if you sell it for scrap gold, but this is most likely to happen if your pieces are unique in some respect. Otherwise, you are unlikely to get much more than gold dealers would offer you, but it doesn’t hurt to try.
