Some Things to Remember When Selling Sterling Silver
With times being so hard economically, more and more people have turned to selling sterling silver in order to have enough cash just to get by. This is a perfectly reasonable and acceptable course of action in times of financial hardship, however it’s important that you proceed carefully as opposed to recklessly selling your sterling silver to anyone who will take it. Plenty of people are interested in buying precious metals nowadays, and finding a buyer isn’t an issue – but finding the RIGHT buyer is what’s important.
What Even IS Sterling Silver?
It’s very likely that you might own sterling silver, most commonly in the form of sterling silver flatware, without even realizing what it actually is. When something is “certified sterling” it simply means that whatever the object is (a fork, a pot, a plate, etc) is actually largely made from silver and isn’t simply silver plated. Sterling silver is typically around 92-93% silver and 7-8% some other metal such as copper. Pure silver (known as fine silver) is actually too soft to be practical and that’s why we use sterling silver for things instead.
You can differentiate between something that’s sterling silver and something that’s silver plated by looking for a stamp somewhere on the object which will indicate that it’s certified to be real sterling silver.
Who Should I Sell it to?
As previously mentioned, these days the options when it comes to who you can sell silver to are numerous since so many people are interested in investing their fragile paper money into more solid, secure precious metals. But what kind of buyer is the best buyer?
Well you can rest assured that the worst buyer for precious metals like sterling silver is any sort of pawn shop, since they aren’t looking to invest and are looking to “buy low, sell high”. Seriously, you can find a buyer for this stuff so easily that there’s really no reason to take it to a pawn shop – so don’t.
A good way to find buyers for sterling silver is to look online (which so happens to be a good way to do a lot of things these days). Try to find a company or website that buys at or near the current market value, since that’s typically the best price you can expect to receive. Also look for sites or companies that are reputable – there are a lot of shady people in this industry so you need to be wary of getting scammed.
Should I Hold Onto my Silver? What if the Price Goes Up?
Well this is of course part of the risk and one of the downsides when it comes to selling precious metals such as silver or gold – you could sell it today for one price and then it ends up doubling in price the next day. It’s pretty much impossible to predict price fluctuations in rare commodities, so if you’re in dire need of cash you might as well sell it now instead of waiting around to see if the price goes up. Really the best choice is to try and manage your budget better so that you don’t have to sell your silver in the first place – Fiat currency is becoming more and more worthless every day, and precious metals will be one of the things that will most assuredly maintain its value, so owning even a small amount of it is definitely in your best interest. But if bills are due, bills are due, and last I checked most places don’t accept payment in silver – so you gotta do what you gotta do, and if selling sterling silver is your only option, then by all means, do it!
