I need advice

[phyldu]

My husband has lung cancer and I need to sell some of my grandmother''s jewelry. Her wedding ring is about 50-60 years old, with 24 diamond chips covering it. (I also have 2 beautiful Rhinestone earring sets that are as old - sorry about the ''rhinestone'' bit.) How can I sell these; where do I go, what do I do.

Thank you so much for any help.

 

[niceice]

Hello Phyllis,

We're sorry to hear about your husband, we hope that the treatment he receives provides him with healing and relief.

It can be quite a challenge to sell worn pieces of jewelry and often it is not profitable to do so, we know this is not what you want to hear right now, but we don't want to have unreasonable expectations about the used jewelry market. Those who tend to buy the jewelry for resale do so only to turn a profit for themselves and usually pay the seller far less than the item is potentially worth, so goes the business...

First off, you need to know what you've got and you need the fair market value to be assessed by somebody that has no interest in buying or selling the jewelry. We recommend reviewing the list of qualified independent GIA Graduate Gemologists available here on PS via the "appraisers" link at the top of this and every other PS page... Talk with the various appraisers and determine who specializes in evaluating older cuts, our first inclination is to recommend that you talk with David Atlas of Accredited Gemological Appraisers http://www.gemappraisers.com because that's who we call when we have an evaluation question for older jewelry items because it's a speciality of Dave's... But other appraisers such as Marty Haske, Martin Fuller, Bill Lieberman and Richard Sherwood are equally qualified. Wouldn't it be great if one of them were in your area? We don't know, they might be... But if they're not, we wouldn't hesitate to send the jewelry to any one of them for evaluation, you need some sort of expert advice from a non-seller before you can hope to get a fair price for what you are selling... After you have that advice, we recommend selling the items yourself on eBay or a similar venture where you can receive the most for your merchandise as opposed to letting somebody else make that profit at the expense of you and your husband.