Baby boomers are sitting on a $750 billion pile of gold — how savvy heirs can seize this golden opportunity to cash in

A 2026 report from jewelry-tracking startup Unvault estimates the average U.S. household has about $5,700 worth of gold jewelry that hasn’t been professionally valued. Altogether, Americans may be sitting on roughly $750 billion worth of gold by weight and that’s before counting silver, platinum, gemstones or pieces that may be valuable because of their designer.

The Great Wealth Transfer is increasingly looking like a Great Stuff Transfer, except some of that “stuff” may be worth thousands.

Andrew Stinger found himself in the middle of that handoff after losing both of his parents within months of each other. His mother, Nancy, died of cancer in 2024, followed unexpectedly by his father, Bill, in January 2025. Suddenly, Stinger and his brother were sorting through their parents’ South Carolina home, deciding what should stay in the family and what they were ready to let go.

“Neither my brother nor I were ever going to open the Bill and Nancy Stinger Museum,” Stinger told Bloomberg.

Before you sell the family jewels

Stinger chose to keep his father’s Omega watch and his mother’s yellow-gold wedding band, pieces whose real value had very little to do with what a buyer might offer for them.

“My mom wore her wedding band every single day, as long as she could, through the end of her cancer battle,” Stinger said. “It’s a reminder of everything she was: intelligent, artistic, tenacious, motivating and fun.”

For Stinger, his mother’s wedding band was a small piece of her he could still hold onto. Other jewelry stayed in the family too. Stinger passed some pieces along to his mother’s sisters so they could eventually make their way to the next generation keeping not just the jewelry, but some of the family history attached to it.

That handoff is happening on a massive scale. Cerulli Associates estimates roughly $124 trillion in wealth will transfer through 2048, including about $105 trillion expected to go to heirs.

But sentimental value and financial value don’t have to cancel each other out. Whether you plan to wear an inherited piece, tuck it safely away or eventually sell it, it still pays to know what’s actually sitting in the jewelry box.

“Jewelry does not have one value,” Richard Tilles, president of jewelry buyer CIRCA, told Moneywise. “It has several, and each answers a different question.”

There’s replacement value, which reflects what it might cost to buy a comparable piece and is typically used for insurance. There’s resale value and then there’s melt value, which looks only at the worth of the underlying metal and stones.

“Melt value, based only on metal and loose stones, is the floor,” Tilles said. “It leaves out design, maker, period, and craftsmanship.”

That floor has risen considerably as gold prices have climbed. Gold set 53 new all-time highs in 2025, according to the World Gold Council, while the annual average price rose 44% from the year before. Even as consumers bought less jewelry by weight, the value of global gold-jewelry demand climbed to a record $172 billion.

Sell it, keep it or give it a second life

Once you know what inherited jewelry is worth, the next question is what to actually do with it. Bloomberg profiled Denise Williams, who inherited jewelry that had already passed through several generations of her family. Her mother was the daughter of an Antwerp diamond dealer who escaped the Nazis in 1940 with gems sewn in her clothing.

“She had the most beautiful jewelry. Some of it she’d inherited from her mother and her grandmother,” Williams said.

Williams later split the collection three ways: pieces she sold at auction, pieces she kept for sentimental reasons and older designs she had reworked into jewelry she would actually wear.

One diamond of more than two carats, for example, had been set in a style she didn’t love. Williams had the stone reset into something she would actually wear. Other inherited diamonds became earrings she wore to her sons’ weddings and hopes will eventually make their way to her granddaughters.

But before heirs start redesigning Grandma’s ring or listing it for sale Jennifer Garland Ross, Founder and Principal of Art Peritus, says there’s a more important question to answer first.

“Before asking, ‘Should I keep it or sell it?’ I think the better first question is simply, ‘What exactly do I have?’” Ross told Moneywise. “Once you know that, all the other decisions become much easier.”