Garage Sales

I like having them, I like going to them. Garage Sales are awesome. I've made money at garage sales, both buying and selling. So far my best garage sale so far has netted me just over $600. I've also bought things that I've later sold on eBay, and done really good on that.

Probably the best single deal I've made buying at a garage sale and selling on eBay was a almost perfect copy of the 1981 Milton Bradley boardgame Dark Tower. I saw this at a sale for $10, and I originally thought, wow, that's a lot. Then I looked it up on eBay, and immediately went back and bought it. When I got it home, it had all the parts for the game, except for the 2 extra pegs (needed 40 to play but originally came with 42 just in case) and one of the 7 segment displays had one segment that didn't light up. I very specifically listed all this on the listing, and still sold the game for $137.50. That's 1275% profit, so that's not too bad.

I also bought a back-lit wall clock that looked like it belonged in a 60's diner. It was obviously a Pepsi promotional clock. The guy wanted $5.00 for it, and I said I really liked it. The only thing was is that it wouldn't light up. The guy apologized for this and told me I could just have it. So I took it and when I got it home I opened it up and there was a very simple wiring harness that had been unplugged. I plugged it in, and it worked great. Ended up selling that for $70.

What's I've recently done is buy some books that I knew I could sell online. I've bought about $100 worth of books and so far have sold some of them for about $400. Sure it's only 300% so far, but still that's a workable business model.

I also really like having garage sales and wheeling and dealing. For some reason I'm good at it too. It's really just a matter of knowing which people want to spend their money. Getting people to give you their money is easy as long as you don't get flustered. If people are wheeling and dealing with you, and are asking you to come down on something, that means they want to give you their money. It's easy to sell to people like these. It's surprising how people don't recognize that these people want to buy. I guess that's because the normal person thinks that it's a good idea to sell the stock they own at all time lows and put their money in precious metals at all time highs because it's "safe". That's actually what I call "dumb". Guess I'm just weird.