How and where should I sell my silver bullion bars, bullion coins and ingots?

Feb 193 min read

Cashing out of Silver Bullion:

After I've taken a position in hard money assets like silver bullion, how do I cash out of them? How and where should I sell my silver bullion bars, bullion coins and ingots?

You have 2 choices when you want to sell your bullion items:

The first one is to visit your local coin shop. With this option you are always in complete control of the custody of your silver. You walk into the store, get a quote and if it is satisfactory you can decide to sell and take an immediate payment. This option would be our recommendation if it is available to you.

The second option is to do a mail in sale. There are several large legitimate sellers of bullion that also offer to purchase your bullion through the mail. JM Bullion, Kitco Metals and APMEX are some that offer this service. These are very large national dealers who selll bullion nationally through their websites or even on Ebay. Their mail in service is basically the reverse. You indicate to them what you have to sell through their websites or on the phone and then they give you quotes and then you mail it in. They even offer to confirm and lock in the prices upon your pledge to mail in. This can be a good option, especially if you live in a rural area and there are no precious metals dealers or local coin shops to receive your bullion items. The only downside is that you will incur shipping costs and also run the risk of a snufu in the mail or on the receiving side of the check in process of the national mail in bullion buyer. It is likely that 99.9% of the time, there will be no problem. However, there is always more risk mailing something in versus selling to an in person dealer.

How much should I sell my bullion items for? It depends on the items you have, but when you are selling your hard bullion assets, unfortunately, you are not going to receive the NY spot price. You will likely receive between 4-6% below that. The dealer usually sells bullion often only a little bit above spot price at between 4-6% higher when they retail it. The dealer also might even choose to wholesale the bullion and make even less than that. Dealers are running a business and have overheard, so they need to make something on the spread between what they buy the items for and what they are selling them for. This is definitely something to keep in mind when you are buying hard assets, which is that you will have to factor in about a 8%-10% spread that you will have to overcome before you can become profitable. So the asset has to appreciate by 8-10% before you actually at break even. This is unlike the store market, where the brokerage house works only on a .5% margin. However, with stocks, everything is all electronically traded and they don't have to physcially handle the items and have all those extra employees that need to check in and check out items. Why lose 8% right off the bat when you purchase bullion items, does that really make sense? Why not trade a stock that is tied to bullion? The easy answer here is that with hard assets, you actually have something tangible. With electronically traded assets, you really have nothing and are completely beholden to the trading networks. If they fail or no longer exist you have nothing. With tangible hard assets, you have something no matter what and it can't be evaporated in a split second like with currency, bonds, stocks or crypto. These are not guaranteed. If you own a bullion bar, coin or ingot it is always there and can't disappear into thin air.

We wish you the best of luck with buying and selling silver and gold bullion. Hope you enjoyed our article!

Article Authored by Greg Arbutine on 2-19-25

We Buy all Silver!

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If you have items that you'd like to sell,

or even just want to get an idea on valuation

please click the email us button for a quote.

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Thanks,

Greg Arbutine