Easy Money!
The Budget Doctor’s Advice on Finding Extra Money
Month after month we lecture about spending and saving and giving up fun to get out of debt. How about some free fun that might turn up extra money?
When you moved from Pottstown, PA there is a good chance that you forgot to collect your deposit from the water company. When you hurried from Borger, TX you may have left money in the local bank. When your great aunt in Taos, NM passed away and left you $10,000, she probably didn’t have your current address.
So why not begin a treasure hunt? All you need is a map and we are happy to provide two. The first one is really too easy. Just go to www.missingmoney.com and enter your name, and lost money from all over the country is revealed. A more challenging approach is to go to www.naupa.org. There, you have to select the state you want to search and follow the directions for that state. Since you may have left money all over the country, you will have to do fifty searches.
Once you find your money, you still have to claim it and somehow prove that you are the same Willie Steel who lived at 1066 Hastings Drive in Williams, WV. Still, that isn’t a bad way to find extra money. It is in fact, much better to do this yourself than to pay a service or person to do the research for you. Why would you pay someone to have that much fun? Did Indiana Jones hire someone to search the temple?
And while we’re on the topic of easy money, this may be a good time to sell your coin collection and your grandmother’s jewelry (assuming your grandmother doesn’t mind). Gold, platinum and silver prices are extremely high and an old broach that weighs only a few ounces could be worth thousands of dollars. And coins from long, long ago (before 1965) that were actually made of silver, could be worth many times their face value, even if they are in bad shape.
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to sell gold, platinum and silver. There are people who go from town to town buying these things but they almost always offer far less than the true value. A local coin dealer may offer a fair price, but you can’t be certain until you know what you have. This is where the work comes in.
You need to find out the approximate value of your metals. Gold jewelry, for example, may be 10 karat or 14 karat or 18 karat and 18 karat gold contains more gold than 14 karat gold. Since “pure” gold is 24 karat, you have to weigh your 10 karat necklace and figure out 10/24 or 42% of the price of gold that day. You can find the price for gold, silver and other metals at many Web sites, including www.kitco.com. So if the price is $800 and you have two ounces of 14 karat gold, it is worth 58% of $1,600 or $928. The dealer needs to make a profit, so subtract another 10% and figure that $835 is a fair price. You will not be exact in your estimate since you don’t know what other metals are mixed in and your scale probably doesn’t measure troy ounces, which are about 10% heavier than a regular ounce.
Now you need to offer your metals on line and in person to get bids. And if the price goes way up or way down tomorrow, you need to do the math again. It is a bit of work, but there is serious money to be made if you are willing to work at it.
Certainly copper pennies are also worth more than a penny if you sell them by the ton, but the profits aren’t yet quite large enough to make that practical.