Most people selling silver have no idea what it is worth

I ran an online precious metals buying business for eighteen years. People mailed me their silver and I sent them a check. I saw what arrived, what it was really worth, and how often the person sending it had been quoted something insulting somewhere else first.

I am not buying any more. That is precisely why I can write this. Nothing here is trying to get your metal into an envelope addressed to me, because there is no envelope. What follows is what I would tell a friend who called and said they had found a canteen of grandmother's cutlery in the loft.

This is the part nobody explains, and it is the single most common reason people believe they were cheated when they were not.

When a buyer quotes you a price, they are committing to a number for metal that will not physically reach them for several days. In that window the market can move against them, and on a volatile week it can move a long way. So they widen the spread - the gap between what they pay you and what they can sell for - to cover that risk. The quote gets worse, and from where you are standing it looks like greed.

Sometimes it is. Often it is arithmetic. The practical consequence is the same either way: if silver is swinging hard this week and you are not in a hurry, waiting for a calmer stretch is worth real money. That is advice a buyer has no incentive to give you.

Selling silver well is not complicated, but it is easy to get wrong by skipping a step. Almost everything that goes wrong comes down to a seller answering one of these four questions with a guess instead of a fact.

After enough years on the buying side, you notice the same few errors turning up again and again. None of them require expertise to avoid. They require only knowing they exist.

Accepting the first offer. The first number a seller hears becomes the anchor for everything after it, even when it is poor. A single second quote breaks the spell, and it is the cheapest insurance available.

Weighing on a kitchen scale in ounces. A troy ounce is heavier than the ounce on a food scale, and mixing the two throws every calculation off by about ten percent. Weigh in grams if in doubt, then divide by 31.1.

Cleaning before selling. Polishing removes a whisker of metal each time and, on anything collectable, strips the patina a buyer is paying for. Never clean coins at all. If a piece is destined for scrap, cleaning changes nothing; if it is not, cleaning can quietly cost you money.

Melting a coin without checking it. Coins are the category where the object most often beats the metal. A scrap buyer has no duty to tell you a dollar is worth ten times its silver, so the check has to come from you. The coins and bars page covers what to look for.

Selling into a panicked market. When the price is swinging hard, buyers widen their spreads to protect themselves, so payouts get worse precisely when the headlines make selling feel urgent. If you are not in a hurry, a calmer week is usually worth real money.

Mixing purities in one bag. A lot is often valued at the rate of its least interesting contents, so tossing sterling, plate, coins and world silver into a single pile invites a buyer to price the whole thing conservatively. Sorting by what a piece actually is, before anyone sees it, is unpaid work that quietly raises your final number.

Treating a photograph as a valuation. No one can price silver from an image, because value comes from weight, purity and today's spot price, and a photo shows none of them. A photograph of a hallmark can confirm what something is; it can never tell you what it is worth. That figure only ever comes from the arithmetic.