Medal US Silver Coin with Gold Nugget 1970 to Date

Well, this is pretty cool. It's a silver coin with a gold nugget attached. Nice!

These are modern medals, novelty pieces, or keepsakes, not really coins, with an added twist of real gold fastened to the surface. We have seen a few different designs of this theme, but we could not find one exactly as Heather describes. Presumably Heather's medal is like the one in our main picture, but with different inscriptions.

Before evaluating these pieces, it is important to mention that they are easily counterfeited. There are plenty of ways to make inexpensive metals look like silver and gold, and there are plenty of crooks who will steal your money by selling base metal at silver and gold prices. Be sure you know the dealer you are buying these items from. If you don't know the seller, don't pay too much. It may be a fake.

The value of these medals comes from three factors:

• the value of the silver
• the value of the gold
• the sentimental value

We can get estimates of the silver and gold value, but you are going to have to figure out the sentimental value yourself. They are neat items. I'd probably be willing to spend $10 US dollars on the sentimental value for myself.

The silver value is relatively straight forward to evaluate. Most of these medals are made of 1 troy ounce of pure silver, although the one in our picture is made of 1.2 troy ounces. The price of silver changes every day, but you can look it up easily online. According to kitco.com, silver trades today at $24 US dollars per troy ounce. So the silver portion of the coin is worth about $24, or 1.2 x 24 = $29 for a 1.2 ounce coin. That's today. Tomorrow will be different, so be sure to look it up.

The gold nugget is much more difficult to estimate. Such tiny nuggets usually weigh 0.01 to 0.1 grams, and are more like 'flakes' or 'coarse flakes' than 'nuggets.'

The picture from gold-nuggets.org shows a 1 gram gold nugget next to a US dime. If a 1 gram nugget is that big, how much do you think the flake on your coin weighs? You will have to estimate for yourself, but most of these I've seen are 1/20th the size of the 1 gram nugget (or less), making the gold content 0.05 gram.

There are 31.1 grams in a troy ounce, so 0.05 grams is 0.0016 troy ounces. At the current gold price of $1390 per troy ounce, that's about $2 worth of gold.

Of course the value of gold and silver go up and down all the time. As of this writing, with $24 silver and $1400 gold, these medals contain about $30 of raw materials. Add another few dollars for artistry and manufacturing cost and a single coin could be made for, say, $35.

If you were a dealer selling these items, you would probably double or triple your cost and mark them for sale around $60 to $100 retail. If a person came in to your dealership and wanted to sell one to you, you would probably pay $20 to $30, reserving the margin to keep your dealership solvent.

Finally, in summary, at today's value of gold and silver, these medals are worth $20 to $30 each because that's how much you can sell them for.
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