Before you start selling your gold, you should consider a few factors. The price of gold has reached very high levels during this economic crisis and it’s a great time to be a seller of gold, but only as long as you know what you’re doing. Otherwise you risk losing money or making less than you should. What is nice about gold is that it has a certain value and it’s there whether you have gold coins, jewelry or bars. The price for a certain amount of gold remains the same.

One of the important factors you need to know about when you’re selling your gold is the weight that you’re selling; another is the purity of the gold and finally the price at which gold is traded at the time of the sale.

Whenever you see weight measurements, you either see them as troy ounces or grams. When you see the gold price quotes, those are done on troy ounces, not on grams. The official gold price will be for 31.1 grams of gold, which is the equivalent of a troy ounce.

Another thing you should have a grasp of when you’re selling gold is the purity of the gold. The gold jewelry has a certain karat, or purity. The purest one is the gold marked as 24 karat, but at that kind of purity it’s too soft and jewelry can’t be made with it. Alloys are used instead, so the purity decreases. An 18 karat piece of gold will have 18 out of 24 parts as gold and the rest will be a metal. In order to find out how much pure gold you have in that piece of jewelry, you have to take the karat number and divide it by 24. Once you know how much pure gold there is in that piece of jewelry, you will know its value.