in most cases a pawn shop will take in a class ring as long is it is made out of gold.
Now there you are, 10, 15, 30 years after your graduated high school, holding onto a class ring that you never wear.
You need some money to cover a bill or other unexpected expense but you aren’t quite sure where to turn or what to do.
Do pawn shops buy class rings? Is it something that you can get a loan on or sell outright?
That’s a good question that a lot of people ask and fortunately the answer is pretty straight forward, most of the time anyways.
The quick and dirty answer to this question is that yes, if your class ring is made out of solid gold, then there is a very good chance that your local pawn shops will be happy to look at it and will probably offer to buy it from you.
If however your class ring is made out of something other than gold, the chances of a pawn shop buying it fall dramatically.
You have to understand that class rings aren’t something that pawn shops can typically resell in their retail spaces. It’s just not something that people come in looking to buy because it normally only has significance to the original owner.
More often then not, as long as your class ring is made out of a metal like gold, a pawn shop will buy it. That having been said, they don’t have a very high potential of being sold in a retail case so you will likely just be offered a percentage of the scrap metal value.
So Why Do Pawn Shops Buy Class Rings
With that in mind, you might ask yourself why any pawn shop would even buy a class ring then?
Well the answer is that as long as the class ring is made out of gold, the pawn shop will be able to turn around and melt the ring down to get the scrap value of the metal out of it.
That means that even if the ring isn’t going to be worth much of anything in the retail side of the store, the pawn shop will still have a way to get money out of it – making it something that they are much more likely to buy or make a loan against.
How Much Do Pawn Shops Pay For Class Rings
Keeping all of this in mind, when a pawn shop looks at your class ring they are going to be looking at it just for the raw metal value alone and not much else.
Because of that, you can typically expect them to weigh the ring, determine the purity of the metal and then make you an offer for approximately 40-60% of whatever the current spot value of the gold itself is.
That will vary up and down with the price of gold as that market moves on a daily basis.
Is There Anything You Can Do To Get More For Your Class Ring
Typically not, no. It’s going to completely depend on how much metal is there and how much the pawn shop thinks that they will be able to melt the ring down for.
Like we said earlier, there is no retail potential for this kind of item and because of that, you just can’t expect great things out of the ring.
If it was another item – something that the pawn shop could potential resell to a retail customer or online on a site like eBay or Amazon, then there might be some things you could do to influence the price – but in this case, there’s not much to work with.
