The school summer holiday has begun and this marks an interesting time in the jewellers and pawnbrokers calendar. Parents who until now have been managing perfectly well with their work / life balance suddenly have a house full of children demanding money, holidays and most costly of all – their time!
Kids need new uniforms, holidays need paying for and the household bills keep coming. It’s not surprising that pawnbroking arm of the business can get really busy and many customers are looking to borrow a few hundred pounds to help with their holiday cash flow. Our FX sales hit their peak and Euro’s and Dollars flow out in their £1000’s.
The good news is that the gold price is really strong. Customers continue to bring in their unwanted gold and sell their unwanted jewellery to raise some funds. Gold has increased by 1/3rd in price since the Brexit vote and now is a really good time to sell your unwanted gold.
That said, we had a gentleman in last week who quite literally bought us out of sovereigns! A few weeks ago we were scrapping any spare coins that were surplus to requirements – now we can’t supply enough and they are really back in demand. Our gold and diamond jewellery is still priced at fantastic value as the prices of the more expensive new replacement stock have not filtered through. ‘Pre-owned value rules’ at times like these and the shrewd shoppers are picking up bargains while they can.
It was interesting to find that we had a gold $20 coin to price up yesterday and not being sure what they were worth, I went on line.
There were two identical ‘Double Eagle Liberty Head’ coins were displayed, both minted in 1879 – the same year as ours. One was worth $1395 the other $11,775. The difference in price was due to where they were minted and a tiny little ‘S’ or ‘CC’ marked on the coin under the image of the eagles donating where it was minted – ‘San Francisco’ or ‘Carson City, Nevada’. Sadly, ours was an ‘S’ – worth only $1395 but it was interesting to note that these coins are still worth 60 times their original gold weight value.
Our customer that is stocking up on his sovereigns clearly knows where he wants to put his money in times like this and is to keep his investments as good as gold!
If you have any interesting jewellery, watches or stones that you would like to sell or value, call into your nearest branch at Seacroft, Shipley or Batley or email me at support@brownandgold.co.uk and we will see if you could be sitting on a hidden fortune!
Chris Brown