I've been accidentally putting this post off for a long time. As I was clearing out old drafts of published posts, I saw this one was still saved in my drafts. It's been sitting there for at least a couple of months, so I figured I'd finish it since 
When COVID was at its peak, I chose to stay home. With free time on my hand and a desire to keep my mind busy, I set off on a challenge. I had come across Wallstreetsilver on Reddit and found out there were places that would take your Sterling (92.5% purity silver) silver and gold, and would either send you a check or turn it into bars of .999 gold or silver and take their cut. I did some research and chose to go with Prospector's Gold and Gems, since they're fairly close to me, which would help reduce shipping costs and time.
I downloaded the Scrap It! app for Android, which lets you calculate the silver and gold content, bases it off real-time spot pricing, and even prices it per gram. I set it so I was only paying about 65% of spot, to allow for PG&G to take about a 15% cut, and also factor in my cost to ship them everything. Based on rough calculations, this would net me silver at spot or maybe 10% over, in the event some items weighed slightly less than advertised.
Hunting on eBay
I decided to check eBay listings. For gold, people were paying more than 20% over melt. I did the math, and by the time I were to get it back in bars, I'd be paying a 30-40% premium. That meant it was cheaper to buy minted products, since they only had a 15% premium.
I turned to Sterling silver and realized there were deals to be had. Sure, there were some auctions where people wanted way too much, but there were a lot of estate, Goodwill and private auctions that were cheap.
My key to winning these items was a website called GIXEN. You can put in eBay auction URLs, set your price, and it will bid up to that price right before the auction closes. So long as nobody else placed a lot of bids, this gave the appearance nobody was interested and was more likely to result in me winning the item for a cheaper price. I estimate I was successful about 65% of the time with this, so it was worth it.
Anything that was in good condition, usable and could be resold I sold off at a 20% mark-up, like these:
I'd estimate what I could sell these for when determining what I wanted to bid over 65% of melt.
Non-Silver Weight
The real challenge was items that had stones, beads, charms, etc. If an auction had a stone's carat weight, I could calculate it and subtract it out using this formula:
I was always conservative in my estimates and assumed the stone was heavier than advertised. If there were no dimensions given, I just had to guess and erred on the heavier side. More often than not, the carat weight wasn't listed and I was just guessing and trying to be conservative with my estimates.
Adding to My Stack
The nice pieces I resold for cash. I paid off the cost of the auctions and used the profits to buy silver bullion. Finding buyers was fairly easy, as I belonged to a subreddit called Pmsforsale, and it was quite common to see Sterling items up for sale.
I once found a $200 Sterling necklace with blue and white sapphires, in a jewlery lot I paid $50 for, and happily resold it. It even had the tag still attached! It looked very similar to this necklace.
The main difference is that in the picture where you see the solid Sterling rings, mine had smaller rings with white sapphires embedded in them.
There was no shortage of nice Sterling silver to resell. Anything that didn't sell or was too damaged to sell was turned into silver bars. I'd sell some of the bars to pay for the auctions and keep the rest for myself.
Final Thoughts
Scouring stores and online for Sterling silver was fun. It did, however, take up a lot of extra time. On the other hand, it did allow me to add a nice amount of cheap silver to my stack. If you have the time, know where to look and what to look for, it can be both a fun and profitable adventure!
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