More locals turn gold, silver jewelry into cash

At first glance, the pile of dimes looked like the same kind of coins you’d find in your wallet or change jar at home. But Jason Bowman knew different.
“Look at the sides,” he said, holding one dime on its edge. He compared the coin, made before 1964, to a newer dime. The side of the older dime was a solid silver color. The side of the newer dime was two different metal colors pressed together.
“This one is made of 90 percent silver,” Bowman said of the old dime. Dimes made after 1964 are not.
A row of neat stacks of silver dimes ran along the top of the cherrywood display case at Bowman’s business, Napa Gold & Silver.
The Napa native recently opened a business buying and selling gold, silver, coins, jewelry and other items. He was counting the dimes for a Napa woman who brought in her husband’s garage sale finds, which included the silver dimes, silver quarters, half dollars and some broken bits of silver jewelry and silverware.
Gold and silver buying is big business these days, Bowman and other local buyers report.
“The sheer volume of people that are interested in both buying and selling have gone up to the highest level I’ve seen since 1979,” Greg Krill of North Bay Rare Coin and Jewelry said. “We had lines out the door back then,” he said.
Today, gold and silver prices have been rising steadily for the last seven or eight years, back to all-time highs for gold and close to it for silver, Krill said.
People buy or sell gold or silver for different reasons, said Krill, who has businesses in Napa and St. Helena.
“On the sell side, people are taking advantage of record prices, as well as they just need money,” he said.
Cash from selling gold or silver can be a lifeline to people who are unemployed or facing tough times, Krill said. “It may not be their first choice to sell, but sometimes the necessities of life preempt sentimental value,” he said.
“On the buy side, even at these prices there is a lot of strong demand because it’s becoming more mainstream for people to buy gold and silver to diversify their overall investment holdings.”
“With the economy rough as it is overall, precious metals and coins are one of the bright spots people have,” Krill said.
“We buy gold in pretty much any form,” Krill said. That can include coins, bars or nuggets. “I buy a lot of scrap gold (such as) dental gold, broken jewelry, old class rings — a big spectrum.” He also buys silver coins, bars and silverware, he said.
Customers ask him how he knows if the gold is real.
“Most items are marked,” Krill said. “Although occasionally a piece is erroneously marked, the big majority are marked correctly. Then we also have the ability to run chemical tests on the spot to figure out the purity of the metal.”
From there, a price is calculated based on the purity, the price of gold and silver on a given day and refining costs. “We pay a pretty high percentage of what we net,” Krill said.
Bowman, who has been buying and selling gold and silver since 2003, and also worked in a gold and silver shop in Sacramento, recently opened a retail storefront on California Boulevard. In just two months, he’s processed more than 200 transactions ranging from $5 to $25,000, he said.

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Posted by VBN on Oct 2 2011. Filed under Gold. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry