How to Pan For Gold

Step 8: Update: Selling your Gold

I recently sold some of my accumulated gold. First I looked into various ways of selling it. Taking it to a jewelry store is one way. Many of them buy gold. The price they buy it at though is way below market value. I looked at eBay. Lots of people sell gold nuggets on bay, and get decent prices for them. I also looked into selling at one of my local auction houses. One local auction house sells a lot of expensive gold coins and jewelry every week. I decided to go with the auction house for my initial sale.

I couldn't stand to part with all my hard won gold. I kept some for the souvenir value and as a reminder of all the neat places I had gone and all the hard work I put in to mine it. The rest I carefully weighed up. It came to 6.1 grams of nuggets, flakes and dust. I sealed it in a new plastic vial and wrote up a little description of the contents. Then I consigned it to the auction house.

Just before the auction, the price of gold shot back up to about $900 per ounce. I was thrilled. The vial of gold sold for $150 at the auction. a little below market price, but then again, it wasn't pure gold. It was raw, unrefined gold with impurities.

The auctioneer takes a percentage off the top. This varies from auction house to auction house. You may want to shop around for the best deal if you go the auction rout for selling your gold. However, not all auction houses may get a crowd that that is interested in buying gold nuggets. I went with an auctioneer that regularly sells gold, and has a regular crowd of gold buyers, even though the auctioneer's fee was not the lowest around.

In the future, I may try selling my largest nuggets separately on eBay. Nuggets seem to go for a premium price there. Then I'll sell the rest of the flakes and dust at auction.

Now that I am making money at this, I guess I have lost my amateur status. Now I can call myself a professional gold miner. I can't wait to get out and find more gold.

Comments

[AlternateLives]

Sorry if I'm resurrecting a dead thread, but how would you fare selling the native gold on the scrap market?

[hackmattr]

You should try Midwest Refineries. They take about 5% of the price, but they are more trustworthy than any jewelry store. I had 17grams of gold and took it to a jewelry store. The price would have been ruffly $380 at the current price. They offered me $130 for it(RIP OFF ARTIST). they looked like rip off artists and then before they said the price they talked to each other in another language even though they spoke perfect english. I said no, left and sent it to the refinery.

[lemra4]

Now that you know whare to find it can you work the site anyother way than panning?

[hackmattr]

There are alternatives, but usually you still have to pan in order to recieve all the small flakes. You can use a dry wash in order to narrow the amount of material to search through. A dry wash will go through more dirt than panning by hand. you still have to pan the dirt that was caught in the ribs of the drywash. I use this when I go to Arizona and prospect with my uncle. If your lazy at panning then theres a device thats called GOLD MAGIC. this is a pan that is hooked to a motor that turns the pan while you feed the dirt into it. The gold and black sand will travel to the center and the other material will fall out of the pan. This is only good for very small nuggets and flakes. If you had this I still would recommend going through the material that it rejected with a pan. I use this in the rivers in Northern California or down here in southern California. Either way you still use a pan to find the flakes that are easily missed.

[caobas]

That was great! I tried panning for gold in a mountain stream about 500' above sea level in the Dominican Republic. I did it with my son just for fun, and after about 3 hrs of shovelling and panning we gave up. An old lady told us there is no gold in this stream ( thanks, where was she 3hrs ago?) she told us where we could go and try, but it was too far. Next trip down we plan on trying again, it would have been more fun if we found a shiny stone though.