We think you will like – and profit from – the information we will give you in today’s post.

We will tell you about sources of gold and silver that many people overlook when they are looking for precious metals.

The first thing you need to know about investing in gold-plated flatware is that not every piece of gold-toned flatware contains gold. That’s true because. . .

If you like to hunt for old gold jewelry that’s worth recycling, chances are you have seen some items that match this description . . .

“It’s an old ring that’s just a piece of costume jewelry. It’s got a big fake stone in it that’s probably just made of glass. Why should I pay attention to it, when it’s probably worthless?”

We recently overheard a friend say, “I attended a wedding reception at a catering facility last week and, for the first time in my life, I used gold-plated flatware. Wow, that stuff must have been worth a fortune.”

Those gold-plated forks, knives and spoons were doing exactly what the catering hall wanted them to do, which was to add a luxurious flourish to the dining experience. Gold conveys a very exciting sense of luxury, just as it has for thousands of years.

Don’t Overlook Gold-Plated Items

When most of us go looking for gold items to recycle, we look first for solid gold items, and with good reason. Even very small items made of karat gold can contain enough gold to make them worth a lot more than they appear – small items like stud earrings, tuxedo studs, lapel pins, tie tacks, and religious and commemorative medals.

In years past, it was relatively difficult to plate a bright, shiny new layer of gold or silver onto other items. To do it, you had to either immerse the items to be plated in a plating tank or, in some cases, use an electrified plating brush to apply a thin new layer of gold or silver.

Way back in 1977, NASA launched its Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Both of them are now about 14 billion miles from Earth and, incredibly, both are still communicating scientific data back to NASA.

You go looking for gold and . . . you find some! Maybe you go to an antique store and find a piece of jewelry that looks like pure, shiny gold, but you find out later that it is only covered with a thin gold plating. Or you discover a gold nugget and find out that it is only a cheap collectible that has been created to look like the real thing, but isn’t.

Gold-plated and gold-covered items look beautiful - and they look expensive. But even though many collectible items have a beautiful surface of genuine gold, some contain only a tiny amount of the precious metal. Over the centuries, tiny amounts of gold have been beaten thin and used to decorate all kinds of items, even buildings.

Bling has been around for centuries. Marie Antoinette, members of the Russian Imperial family and all kinds of royals from past ages have loved to adorn themselves with shiny, oversized pieces of jewelry. They were apparently trying to send a message that said, “I can afford this stuff, you can’t, I am richer than you are, and you better be impressed.”

Over the years, people have made all kinds of common-looking objects out of gold, platinum and silver. If you’re not alert, you could pass them by when you search for precious metal items in antique stores, estate sales, and even online auctions

Shakespeare once wrote, “All that glitters is not gold.” If he had thought about it, he could have written something similar about silver, platinum, rhodium, and other precious metals. The fact is that some shiny things that look like they should be worth a lot of money really aren’t. They either don’t contain any precious metals at all or they contain such small quantities that there is no point sending them to a qualified precious metals refinery like Specialty Metals Smelters and Refiners, because the cost of extracting those metals will be greater than the value of the metals themselves.