Most people love jewellery, either to wear it themselves or to present it to someone they truly care about. Although the majority of gold jewellery is mainly used by women, even men find jewellery fashionable enough. However buying jewellery for the sake of owning something nice is an acceptable initiative, buying jewellery as a form of investment is not a wise decision.
As mentioned earlier, although it is always nice to have gold jewellery, when it comes to selling them, the entire scenario flips over. The reason behind this fact is due to the gold content that is in the jewellery and the workmanship involved in creating the piece. Gold jewellery normally contains different amounts of gold as, gold is too soft to be made into jewellery that lasts thus, the goldsmiths usually add other metals to it to make them harder and durable depending on the ‘karat’ the lowest being 10 karats and the highest being 22 karats which is 91.6 % gold. 24 karats is pure gold and these are only used for gold bullions and gold coins. Coming back to when you sell gold jewellery, an individual takes a piece of gold jewellery to the gold dealers, they must be essentially prepared to lose the money that they paid for the workmanship and the money they paid for the content of the other metals as the gold dealers would only compensate them for the total gold content in the item based on the world market price of gold.
To buy or sell gold jewellery is not a viable ‘investment act’ because people who own gold jewellery actually stand to lose a lot when they sell them due to jewellers high margins. Instead of buying gold jewellery, it is often better to buy silver jewellery as they are relatively much cheaper and they still look good, basically buying gold in general should be an investment act and the best way to invest in gold is by buying bullions or gold coins (although gold coins do carry a small premium that is the cost of minting – it is negligible). There are 2 ways that one is able to buy gold related investments; one is by actually buying the gold physically from dealers and keeping them and the other is buying a piece of paper that declares you are the owner of a piece of gold stored in some vault somewhere across the ocean. Buying bullions is the best way to make ‘gold investments’ only because the price of gold has always been going upwards according to its ‘real value’, although the prices of gold to fluctuate now and then the general trend is constantly going up on average. It would be safe to say that in 10 years the price of gold may be 3,000 dollars an ounce based on the price movements of gold. So the moral of the story is that buying gold jewellery as investments – again- is not a very good idea. If buying jewellery is the only option you have towards owning physical gold and you would not have it any other way, buy 2nd hand jewellery and pay no more than 80 % of the value of spot gold prices if you are planning to hold them as investments. This way, you avoid paying for the workmanship as well as the other metal content in the piece.