Wedding Bands, and being resourceful

Sometimes things don't go as planned, but that is okay...   Aaron has taught philosophy classes for the last 2 semesters at a small college in town, and as far as he knew, this semester would be no different.  Well it turns out that they don't need him this semester, so our budget became a little skewed in the wrong direction.  Luckily, his bride to be is resourceful in the finance department and a professional bargain shopper!  Well I don't know if anyone has been watching the market, but gold has been at it's highest level in a super long time - and the first rule of smart money moves is buy low and sell high.  All of these places in town have been advertising like crazy to come sell your gold for top dollar (it was even on the evening news), so I thought I'd check into it...

My Mom and I cleaned out our jewelry boxes and found the gold stuff that we weren't into anymore, and today after I got off work I headed down to Houston Gold Exchange.  

I must interject that my original thought was something more sentimental.  Well kind of.  I budgeted for rings when gold was reasonably priced back in November, and now rings everywhere seem to be much higher.  But anyway, I thought I could take these old pieces and have them melted down into two wedding bands (and turned into white gold somehow...) but the man at the shop said that doing that was not recommended unless it was something really special to you because when the gold is melted down then reshaped to something else it will become very porous (?) (with pores) and basically be a not as good quality of end product.  Especially for a ring that you intend to wear for the next 50+ years.

I don't know if that is exact science or not, but it is what this dude said, so it is something to google for later.  

I got my free appraisal and all this stuff pictured below is worth $380 bucks!

 The current market price for gold is $1785.80 an ounce.  And you have to figure that these places are here to earn money, so you won't get 100% of the value.  I read that most of these Houston jewelers in the business of buying gold pay 60-70%.  The news story I saw recommended getting a few estimates and such before you sell, and I agree.  There are a few under the radar places that you can send in your gold and they mail you the money and pay around 85-90% but you really need to do your homework on them.  I will say that I have heard nothing but horrible things about cash4gold.com which advertises nationwide that they will rip you off bigtime, so whatever you do, don't go there!  So far a top pick I have seen is www.midwestrefineries.com.  Another thing about sending it off is that they may start melting away before you give then a yay or nay on their offer, so don't send grandma's old wedding ring unless you are sure you don't want it anymore.  So there is your mini-lesson on selling gold, lol.

A funny thing happened though.  The afternoon right before I went to see Houston Gold Exchange, I was looking on www.amazon.com for pictures I could take in to show the type of band that I wanted to have made:

www.amazon.com

A simple pave diamond white gold band.  Well amazon was having a super blowout clearance summer sale on jewelry and this $700ish band was on sale for $150 bucks!  So I told Aaron that we should get it since it was such a bargain, and it has a 30 day window to return it if I don't like it (but I think it is really pretty and just what I wanted).  Win!  Now we just need to get a ring for Aaron, but he just wants a basic band, so it looks like we will come in under budget on the rings.  Awesome!

And Aaron has an interview tomorrow to be a tutor/teach an SAT prep class for highschoolers, so send him some good vibes :)