To pay off debt and increase savings from your current income, there are lots of different ways to cut or lower expenses to focus on these 2 goals. But sometimes, your current income just can’t pull off what you want to achieve. Then what do you do? You need to make more money! Sounds easy? Not for me. I looked for part time jobs, but the hours just didn’t work with my full time job. Looking for a better paying job has been on my agenda for a couple of months, but my first step, which is to update my resume still hasn’t been done.
I’ve been hearing a lot of people selling stuff for money in the financial blogging world, so I decided to do a garage sale for the first time in my life. I don’t have a garage or a yard and our condo complex doesn’t hold a community yard sale, so I asked a friend who owns a town house if their complex has a community yard sale I can join. She said no, but she suggested that we do it at her garage together. So we set a date couple of weeks ago to have it last Saturday. I know this post is late, but better late than never.
What we did to prepare for it:
-put an add on Craigslist.org, yardsalesearch.com, missyusa.com
-put flyers around our neighborhoods
-got tables and clothes rack to place items on
-gathered all the items to sell
-price items and put price stickers on them
On the day of, we put signs on big intersections and other roads on the way to my friend’s house. We placed items by category so it’s easy for people to find things and we priced most items pretty low. Yes I wanted the extra money, but my main objective was to get rid of many of them as possible to free up space in my house.
My friend’s cousin joined too, so we had more stuff than anticipated. Which was good for bringing more people in. We started from 8:30am to 1:00pm. In the last one hour or so, we didn’t have customers at all. No one from her neighborhood came. Her neighborhood is very new and the google map always has trouble finding specific spot in that neighborhood, which probably is one of the reasons why we didn’t have as many customers as we expected.
So the grand total for the day was around $300.00 between the 3 of us. I sold the least at $73.00. Many people were looking for furnitures and appliances and I didn’t have much of those. I had a lot of clothes that didn’t fit most of the people that came. I’m still happy though. $73.00 is more than $0.00 and I could put that into my hubby’s school book purchase coming up in a few weeks.
What I’ll change the next time I do a garage sale or a yard sale:
-price them a little higher
-advertize more
-get more tables and start earlier
-never throw away furnitures or home appliances
-bigger street signs
Although I didn’t make much money, I had fun time with friends setting up, selling, and just chatting in between. I know what to expect and how to handle it better next time, so no regret.
One surprise this week was that my hubby got $180.00 from his school mates. Why you ask? Remember March madness? My hubby did a bracket with his school friends with $20.00 per person for fun and he actually won. They were waiting for a couple of people who didn’t pay, but he finally got paid. Yeah~ I’m putting a little of that to our date fund and our tire fund.
How much did you earn from a garage/yard sale? Any tip to share?
Michelle's Finance Journal 