-- Posted 26 August, 2010 | | Discuss This Article - Comments:

With the economic crisis well underway, estate sale sizes have grown tremendously as cash-strapped children hope to bring home big bucks from their deceased parent's assets.  Traditionally, only small amounts of an estate would be auctioned, as the children of the deceased kept most of the items as an heirloom keepsake.   However, in today's economy, cash is king, and so many people need the spare cash that they'll sell almost anything—including their silver and gold collections. 

Here is a simple guide to make the process of finding, and buying, estate silver easier.

Shopping for a Good Estate Sale

Finding a good estate sale is a little like mining for gold.  You may have to dig through hundreds of listings before you find the items you want, but when you do, you might just stumble upon a hoard of precious metals. 

One of the best places to look is AuctionZip.com, where you can search all available estate auctions within a certain distance of where you live.  Craigslist, an online classifieds website, is another great place to look, but you'll find far fewer results than on AuctionZip.  Finally, check in the Sunday newspaper for auction and estate listings.

Call on Every Estate Sale

Unfortunately, coins and bullion bits are often the most valuable goods many families own up to their death.  Fortunately, most estate sales fail to mention each and every item an estate has to sell.  For instance, if an estate has a large collection of furniture, land or automobiles to sell, it may list only those items in a classified, even if there is a larger hoard of coins to be found for sale, too. 

Your best bet is to call for information on each, asking specifically about jewelry, coins, or bullion that may be left out of the listing.  If they had, in fact, left out coins or bullion for sale, you may get lucky and be one of the few people interested in bullion at that particular sale, or in the best case, the only person interested in bullion. 

Auctions that feature mostly real estate sales are great ones to attend because it will be mostly real estate speculators bidding on the rest of the items.  Auctions that include a large swath of collectables are usually the worst to attend, since they attract quite a few people who may know quite a bit about bullion and coin collecting.

Never Pass Up Jewelry

Far too often do investors get the idea that jewelry is simply gold or silver marked up three to four times over spot.  While this may be true in your typical jewelry stores, those jewelry stores are not selling old, worn out, ugly or broken sterling silver sets.  These sterling pieces are an excellent way to buy discounted silver with purities going from 80% up to 92.5%.  Most silver is marked with a purity, though the best way to ensure the silver is legitimate is to purchase an inexpensive testing kit with bottles for each purity from 10k-24k.  This small investment will allow you to test silver like a professional, and buy like a professional.

Today’s economic conditions make buying silver easier – and more exciting – than before! 

Dr. Jeffrey Lewis

www.silver-coin-investor.com