The price of gold has been surging this year, and it now looks like another good time to wade through your box of gold jewelry that doesn't have much sentimental value and sell it at a high price.

In what is probably the safest precious metal of them all, gold futures briefly topped $800 an ounce Friday for the first time in more than a month.

Gold for December delivery rose $43.10, or 5.8%, to end at $791.80 an ounce on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It jumped 7.1% earlier to $801.90, rising above $800 for the first time since Oct. 16.

Often used as a safe-haven investment, gold topped $900 an ounce in September after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, then fell below $700 in October as bank and funds liquidated their precious-metal assets for much-needed cash in the face of the credit crunch.

March was also a good time to sell gold, when it hit its record high above $1,000 an ounce. But compared to that price, gold is now down more than 20%.

There are plenty of online places to sell gold, but I can't make a recommendation because I've never used them. The only gold I own is my wedding ring, which isn't leaving my finger, no matter how high the price goes.

Aaron Crowe is an unemployed journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Read about his job hunt at www.talesofanunemployeddad.blogspot.com

This wasn't your mother's Tupperware party.

A few weeks ago I got invited to a party at a local mom's house. It was a "Jeans/sell your old gold" party. A woman with a truckload of out-of-season high-end denim jeans was coming to sell us $200 pairs of 7 For All Mankind and True Religion jeans for $50. Also: A man who would buy your old gold.

"Old gold?" I asked. Yes. Like old jewelry you've never worn old gold. "Dig through your drawers and you'll find something to sell," my friend told me. "Last time we had this party everyone bought jeans with the money they made selling their old gold." Apparently, as the economy tanks and the price of gold elevates, women all around the country are hosting these kinds of soirees.

Due to overwhelming demand, the US Mint has had to halt sales of its 24-karat gold buffalo coins. Sales of the solid gold coins have skyrocketed this year, as investors look for safe havens for their money. Though gold prices can be quite volatile in terms of dollars, there is no doubt that gold is indeed valuable. Gold won't declare bankruptcy, as so many major companies in so many major investing portfolios have done recently.

So if you want to invest in gold, you now have one less option. What are some other choices?

You can invest in gold futures, which are currently well below their high point earlier this year, but have been rebounding from a recent low point (but given current events, this fact may well be changing. Keep track before making a move).

People love to express their gratitude for a favorite tool or gadget by claiming that it's worth its weight in gold, a reference which is lost on most of us who don't know how much a pound of gold is actually worth. Thankfully Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has cooked up a handy reference guide to help you measure the monetary density of things. This graphical comparison covers the weight value of U.S. currency, human blood, commodities, illicit drugs and pretty much everything else in between.

I'm still trying to take all this information in and it cracks me up how much a pound of many of these items are worth. Still, I noticed that a few items are noticeably absent from this lineup so I took the liberty of translating these into units to further expand your weight to value ratios.

• Gasoline - $1.79 / lb locally, a gallon of gas weighs 6.15 pounds.
  
• Crude oil - 39 cents / lb as of today, a gallon of crude is ~7 lbs, a barrel of oil contains 42 gallons at $118.35
  
• Quarter Pounder with cheese - $18 / lb, assuming 1/4 lb weight of burger and bun post cooking.
• With gold trading around $830 per ounce, and 16 ounces in a pound, a pound of gold is worth $13,280.

With energy prices coming across that low in pounds I wouldn't be too shocked to see pumps switching over to per pound pricing in the near future! In a more practical sense, I'm sure list will prove to be worth its weight in quarters when you turn a quick profit this weekend, betting some poor chump that a pound of peacock feathers is worth more than a pound of Uranium!

This post is part of a series about real-life signs we're in a recession.

Move over Pampered Chef and Mary Kay. The latest in-home sales "party" concept has reversed the usual guest-to-rep cash flow. Instead of pixie-sized portions of a demonstration omelet, or a makeover that makes your dog bark at you when you get home, the new guest takeaway is cash.

So claim the many "gold party" services cropping up (curiously, overwhelmingly headquartered in Detroit). Companies like My Gold Party and Gold Party by ADI offer to help convert your friends' gold to cash, either by supplying you (for a fee) with the equipment and training for do-it-yourself appraisals or by sending a representative to your home who will set up shop in your kitchen.

Trading your bling-bling for cash is nothing new, of course. Many folks have turned to the jewelry chest when times are hard. Traditionally, you don a scarf and dark glasses and do it quietly in a back room across town. What's new is the idea that parting with Mom's locket or Dad's pocket watch is a rollicking good way to spend a Friday night, accompanied by spinach dip and boxed wine.

As has been reported by WalletPop previously, would-be gold brokers should proceed with caution, particularly if they are required to make an investment upfront. And there are compelling arguments for keeping the lid on your jewelry box for now.

Kyran Pittman blogs at Notes to Self.

In 1848, pioneers in Sutter's Mill, California discovered flakes of gold in a water outflow. Over the next seven years, 300,000 prospectors descended upon the area, desperately searching for gold. In the process, they brought a major influx of warm bodies to California, transforming San Francisco from a tiny town to a sprawling city, creating roads and railways, paving the way for California's statehood, and laying the groundwork for the agricultural explosion that ended up making the state's fortune. While most of the "miner '49-ers" never hit the motherlode, thousands became life-long Californians, helping to transform the state into the economic powerhouse that it is today.

As far as California's gold deposits are concerned, they continued to be exploited for decades, until the cost of extraction outweighed the value of the gold itself. The same goes for Virginia's gold mining, which ended in the late 1940's. The interesting thing, though, is that the cost of gold has a way of fluctuating, and gold that was previously unworthy of extraction becomes a worthwhile pursuit when the cost of gold goes up.

As it is currently doing.

With the stock market causing many of us pain this year, you may have heard commercials advertising the benefits of investing in gold. Gold is considered an excellent investment during rocky financial times because it has historically held its value well.

Gold is particularly attractive right now as the dollar's value is low and interest rates are low too. It gained 31% in 2007 and is showing impressive numbers for 2008 as well. Yet experts disagree on the future of gold. Some say its value is just going to keep rising and the sky is the limit. Other's say the value of gold can't keep rising and a "price correction" (a drop in value) should be coming soon.

Should you invest in gold now? With gold at a historic highs of $900 per ounce, some experts are saying consumers should buy because in the long-term, the price will only go up further. Other experts are saying that the stock market is a much better investment in the long term.

I say that as with any investment, diversification is key. I think it is good to have some of your money invested in gold, but to have other types of investments as well, including real estate, stocks, cash accounts. Never put all (or most) of your eggs in one basket, and you will probably be best prepared to weather difficult financial times.

Tracy L. Coenen, CPA, MBA, CFE performs fraud examinations and financial investigations for her company Sequence Inc. Forensic Accounting, and is the author of Essentials of Corporate Fraud.

It was exactly one year ago yesterday that "Saturday Night Live" ran a commercial parody of Monex Deposit Company, the precious metals investors. The skit featured Kristen Wiig as a well-dressed sophisticate whose obsession with gold reaches increasingly absurd levels, progressing from remarks about gold's dubious value ("Did you know that, in the past 12 years, the value of gold has gone up... a little bit?") to washing her face in gold, drinking Florida Gold orange juice, and donning a gold colored scarf because "it's getting gold outside." Like most "SNL," skits, it was either hilarious or stupid, depending on your mood. (Sorry, we can't show you the spoof, but feel free to check out the original Monex commercial on which it's based.)

The weird thing is, if you had listened to that insane woman and invested in gold when commodities trading opened the following Monday, you would be 53% richer today: On March 17, 2007, gold was trading at just over $650 per ounce. Yesterday, gold reached a record level of $1,034 before settling down around $1,003.

Meanwhile, Frank Holmes, chief executive officer at U.S. Global Investors, recently told CBS Marketwatch that, with oil prices on the rise and the dollar weakening, the precious metal may even hit $2,000 per ounce. Maybe it really is getting gold outside.

Remember the 80s? Gold was about $300 an ounce and every little girl had some pretty little flimsy gold jewelry. The way I remember it, my aunts and uncles' default all-occasion gift was a little locket or pendant. I was not a fussy little girl, and I often ended up with tangles of fragile gold chains in a pretty box.

If I'm to believe the people behind My Gold Party, I should run, not walk, to my parents' house and unearth that pretty box and its handfuls of tangled Christmas and birthday gifts. The idea: you buy a kit from the web site, only $699.50 (!!!) will get you a digital scale, a gold tester (the "GXL-24 Pro evaluates the gold karatage in the common 6 to 24 karat range used in the jewelry industry. This will assist you in determining the gold purity"), the My Gold Party book. Oh, and a magnification loupe, so you can feel like a real pawn shop owner.

With gold at $1,000 per ounce, it seems like such an obvious concept: melt the once-cheap and broken stuff down, get cash. But it turns out you don't have to throw a party or use vastly expensive equipment to weigh your scrap jewelry down; a competing gold recycling service, Gold Kit, will send you an envelope for free -- according to the web site, they'll send you a check immediately.

There's no telling which of these services provides you the better value for your junky jewelry ounce. But I'm leery of any money-making concept with that much sparkle and upfront cost. Books should not cost $59.50, unless they're text books, and we all know why those are so expensive. If you think the concept of having a party where everyone makes money is great, by all means, gather your friends together and have 'em bring their gold, grab a kitchen scale and have someone take the result to a refinery. But this just makes way more sense as a simple act of recycling than a shindig. [Update: Tom Barlow has a great set of considerations before you sell your gold.]

Or you could get a pickup truck and go around the neighborhood picking up scrap metal, like my husband's friend, Jose. It's not nearly so glamorous, but I bet you'd make just as much money.

Pssst, Hey buddy, have I got a deal for you.

Every once in a great while you might get an approach similar to that at your friendly neighborhood resale shop. That can be especially true if it's a shop you're not very familiar with. When a thrift store employee or operator brings out something from under the counter which they have "saved for special customers,"... watch out! The chances are good that you'll be looking at an item from a questionable source.

Take for instance that mint condition collection of Buffalo Head nickels, or a complete set of sterling silver flatware in its own velvet lined case. The sales person may tell you that it came from an estate sale they were at that same morning. Take care about your purchase or you could become guilty of receiving stolen property. It's a dead giveaway when the store clerk suggests that you go outside to look at items they have in their car. Yeah, it's not on the shelves and it's not on the books. Ask them if you really look that much like an idiot.