Syracuse (WSYR-TV) - Gold prices reached an all-time high Wednesday -- bad news if you're in the market for some new gold jewelry, but great news if you're looking to unload some of your old or broken gold.
We hit some pawnshops to get The Real Deal on how much you can make with just a handful of stuff you don't wear anymore.
Everywhere you look, it seems, there's a pawn shop or jewelry store looking to buy your gold.
So we dug into the jewelry box, found a few old class rings, a necklace, gold bracelet and four other small broken rings, and we hit the road.
For our baggie of gold, the first pawn shop offered us $818!
We'd have stopped right there and pocketed the cash, but we had to do some comparison shopping.
We hit up three other shops and got offers of $500, $583 and $668, so the payout ranges pretty significantly.
If you're looking to sell, now is the time to do it.
Over the past month, prices have steadily been creeping up. Experts predict that'll continue at least for the next few weeks.
If you're not comfortable going to a pawn shop, you might be considering the mail-in option that companies like Cash4Gold offer.
We've tested them out before, and they generally pay only a small fraction of what local shops do for your gold. Therefore, you're much better off finding a shop around here to sell it to, because you get the cash the same day, it's more than you'd get through the mail and it's a much easier process.
If you want to buy gold, perhaps as a gift for Christmas, hold off a while -- at least until closer to Thanksgiving, as experts predict gold prices should be dropping by then.
To be as objective as possible, NewsChannel 9 chose not to use the names of the pawn shops we visited in the story. We did not want the prices to be inflated because they would be used on TV.
