This is How Much Gold We’ve Actually Found in Storage Lockers

Every time we tell five people about our real-life Storage Wars, one of them asks:

“So what’s the most valuable thing you’ve ever found?”

You might think it was some gold jewelry or old coins. Actually it was a Tinkerbell statue. But we’ll get to that in another post.

This is about what everyone thinks is the most valuable thing to find: gold.

And yes, gold is worth a lot of money for its weight. And sometimes the gold is so small you can almost miss it. Once I was untangling a ridiculous web of cheap costume jewelry and was about to give up when I realized one of the necklaces was white gold!
Well, good thing I didn’t throw that out.

Finding gold is always cause for a little happy dance but sometimes the score is mind-bogglingly good (is that a word?). And sometimes I have a little spidey sense about where it is, you know?

This one time a locker had 73 boxes in it – yes, they were numbered. And J2 grabbed 12 of them randomly, and brought them for me to dig through, and the first one contained a lot of jewelry boxes and within those we found about 40 grams of gold.

SCORE!

What we do when we find gold is:

1. Look for a stamp to verify it’s gold (numbers like 14K, or .585 can indicate gold).
2. Test it with a magnet. If it’s fake, it’s often magnetic…but not always.
3. Weigh it.

We weigh it to estimate what we’d get if we brought it all to the scrapper. Normally though, we try to sell gold pieces individually if they’re nice because we can get 2-3 times the scrap value.

Anyway, gold prices change all the time but 40 grams of gold is worth about $1,000 at the scrapper these days, SO! Finding that much is always exciting.

And I’m always amazed at how much value fits so easily into the palm of my hand, with enough room leftover for me to hold my celebratory beer (gluten-free, natch).

Think you can’t get gold for cheap without buying storage lockers? Think again. Check for gold stamps on jewelry you see at yard sales. We’ve scored gold chains for a twoonie before (that’s $2 Canadian, for you Yankees out there). And if it’s not gold colored that doesn’t mean it isn’t gold – white gold is often mistaken for silver and we’ve scored amazing jewelry that way as well.

Over the years we’ve probably found less than half a pound of gold. One day we’ll find enough to retire on. Til then, the treasure hunt continues…