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Side Hustle: Garage Sale Wrap-Up

We are now to the end of Garage Sale Week here at Live Real, Now. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

After you shut down on the last day, take the evening off. You’ve just been hard at work for 2-3 days and need a break. Deal with the stuff tomorrow. Tomorrow–and probably the next few days–you’ve got work to do. What do you do with everything that didn’t sell? If you’re planning on making garage sales a regular side-hustle, just box it all up and put it to the side until next time. After all, it’s all priced, sorted, and ready-to-go, right? If, like me, your goal was to declutter, then it’s time for some serious downsizing. Let’s dump the crap.

The first thing we did was box up all of the books and movies to bring to the used book store. We dropped the items at the sell table and spent half an hour browsing a bookstore. That’s never a good way for me to save money. The store we went to checks the demand for everything you bring in. If there’s no demand, they donate or recycle the items and you don’t get paid. DVDs bring about $1 each. VHS is demand-based. Paperbacks are something less than half of the retail price. Hardcovers are demand-based. We were offered $28 and pointed to the huge pile of discard/recycle items that we were free to reclaim. I picked out 4-5 books and movies that I thought had value and left the rest. Bringing the clutter back home would defeat the purpose of going there.

The clothes were handled two ways. First, all of the little girl clothes were bagged and set aside for some friends with a little girl. The rest were bagged and loaded in the truck for a run to Goodwill. The clothes filled the box of our pickup.

The random knick-knacks were also boxed up and delivered to Goodwill, along with most of the leftover toys. This was another completely full truck box. We had a lot of stuff in our sale.

The beat-up or low-value furniture that didn’t sell was put on the curb with “FREE” signs. I posted the free items on Craigslist and they were gone in just a few hours. The Craigslist ad said “Please do not contact, I will remove the listing when the items are gone.” Otherwise, there are usually 10-15 emails per hour asking if the items are still available. The ad didn’t even have pictures and it worked quickly.

Some of the furniture–the toddler bed, changing table, china cabinet, and the good computer desk–were hauled back to our garage to post on Craigslist with a price-tag. They are too good to give away. If the camera wouldn’t have died two nights ago, the pictures would already be up. Some of the other items were also reserved for individual sale. The extra router, the 6 inch LCD screen, and a few other toys will go on Ebay.

Finally there was some stuff that we decided we weren’t going to get rid of. We kept a few movies, but only because I didn’t notice them until I got back from the bookstore. My wife kept a box of Partylite stuff–though most of the leftovers were donated. Very little of the things we had ready for sale are being kept in our lives. Almost all of it is gone, or will be soon.

All in all, this was a cathartic end to last month’s 30 Day Project. There was some surprising emotional attachment to some things I didn’t think I cared about. It’s good to see it gone.

Note: The entire series is contained in the Garage Sale Manual on the sidebar.

Saturday Roundup: Winter Wonderland

Misc

Today, I am planning to be on the receiving end of a foot of snow coming in at 30 miles per hour. Tomorrow, when it’s time to clean all that crap out, it will be 30 degrees below zero. Fun!

The drawing for a $100 Amazon gift card is still going on! Go here for details. It ends on the 15th, so you have 4 more days.

Best Posts

Santa’s got a new phone number! It plays a simple message when you call it, but it’s an easy way to make a little kids smile.

How many days of your life did that that new gadget cost you?

Go watch Crystal get all survivalist and stuff. Have you ever though about what would happen if the world as you knew it ended? Even for a few days, say, after a hurricane hit?

It’s great to live in the future. I can’t wait to hit Lunar Starbucks.

LRN Timewarp

For those unfortunate enough to not have been tuned in since the beginning, I’m going to spend some time reviewing posts from a year ago.

In How to Have a Perfect Life, I layout the planning necessary to live a life you don’t regret on your deathbed. Just take the first step.

Babies are Expensive is one of my most-visited posts to date, and was my first carnival submission, and my first editor’s pick for that submission. The truth is, babies are expensive, but they don’t have to break the bank.

Don’t Screw Future-You was a fun post to write. What would the you from 20 years in the future have to say to you?

Carnivals I’ve Rocked

Consumer Action Handbook was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance.

Mistakes Made was included in the Carnival of Money Stories.

Thank you! If I missed anyone, please let me know.

Selling Your Car

Finance

: English: Jalopy car in Joshua Tree National Park in Hidden Valley Campground (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When it’s time to replace your car, most people focus on the new car, instead of the old, but that is ignoring real money. Your old car–unless it has disintegrated–still has value. Sometimes, it’s just time to ask yourself, “When should I sell my car?”

When you’re looking to sell your car (like with We Will Buy Your Car), you generally have several options:

Tow & crush. If your car has been wrecked, doesn’t run, or is just old and beat up, you may be stuck with calling a junkyard and accepting $50 for them to pick up your car and crush it for scrap.
Trade it in. This is probably the least hassle, but–other than #1–doesn’t pay well. Dealerships are willing to pay something under what they will get at a wholesale auction, which is quite a bit less than the blue book value.
Sell it yourself. Now you’re thinking, “He’s going to buy my car! Oh, bother.” It can be a pain, but it’s also the best way to get a decent price for your wheels.

When you sell your car, there are a few things to keep in mind, much like when you sell something on Craigslist.

Don’t be alone. There are bad people in the world, but they don’t like witnesses. Bad things are much less likely to happen if you have company.
Know your price. Specifically, know three price: your dream price, the price that would make you happy, and the absolute lowest price you are willing to accept. Make sure you figure these numbers out ahead of time. Know what you are comfortable with before it comes time to close the deal.
Check IDs. The buyer is going to want to test-drive your car. That’s fine, but you want to make sure you know who is driving off in your car. “Officer, Sumdood took my car. He was wearing jeans.” That won’t get your car back.
Clean it up. Get the car detailed before you show it to a potential buyer. A sparkling-clean car will almost always bring in a few hundred extra dollars. It’s well worth the expense.

Following this plan should make the sale go as smoothly as possible and bring you the most possible money.

Readers, what have you done to dispose of an old car?

This is a sponsored post written to provide some insight into the world of used car retail.

At 8PM Friday night, our power went out.

We had 70 MPH straight-line winds and horizontal rain. Trees came down all over the neighborhood. Two houses down, 3 tree played dominoes, creaming the house, the fence, and two cars.

How did we do?

The skeleton I keep hanging in my tree lost its right shin-bone and we lost power. So did 610,000 other people in the area.

It’s interesting to watch what happens when the power goes out.

I’m assuming every generator in the area sold out. I don’t know, because I already had one. I do know that most of the gas stations near me ran out of gas on Saturday. Most places were out of ice, too. Batteries were hard to scrounge.

The restaurants that either didn’t lose power or had backup generators were raking in money all weekend. Sunday morning, McDonald’s had a line of cars backed up an entire block.

Our power came back on Monday night. 74 hours of living in the dark ages. We had to read books on paper and cook all of our food on the grill.

We did okay. A few years ago, when the power went out for a day, I bought a generator. Saturday morning, I finally had a reason to take it out of the box.

The generator cost me $450. Over the weekend, we put about $40 worth of gas into it. That kept our refrigerator and freezer running, saving at least $5-600 worth of food. Two neighbors filled up our available freezer space, so that’s another $200 worth of food that didn’t die.

That’s a $500 investment to save nearly $800 worth of food.

Pure win.

The generator also allowed us to keep a couple of fans running, which is great when the power goes out when it’s 90 degrees outside. We also fired up the TV and DVD player at night to help the kids settle down for bed. This is one time I was glad to have an older TV, because cheap generators don’t push out a clean electricity that you can safely use to run nice electronics.

We have a couple of backup batteries for our cell phones, so we got to stay in touch with the world. We borrowed an outlet at our rental property to charge the batteries when they died.

We had about 5 gallons of gas on hand, which was convenient, but not enough. I’m going to grow that. A little fuel stabilizer and a couple of 5 gallon gas cans and we can be set for the next time gas runs out.

We cooked everything on the propane grill. I keep two spare propane tanks on hand, but we didn’t use them. Sunday night, my wife made spaghetti on the grill. The hard part was keeping the noodle from falling through. Nah, we threw the cast iron on the grill and cooked away. Had pancakes and bacon made the same way on Sunday.

We had to buy more lanterns. We had two nice big ones, but at one point, we had 9 people in our house. That’s a lot of games, books, and bathroom breaks to coordinate with only two main lights. This weekend did teach our daughters that the emergency flashlights are not toys. Two of them had dead batteries that needed to be replaced.

Going out to dinner Monday evening was a treat. We sat in a building with air-conditioning!

All said, we spent about $250 that we wouldn’t have if the power would have stayed on. That’s $40 for gas, $80 for dinner(you try feeding a family of 5 for less than that at a restaurant that doesn’t have a drive-through) and $130 on new lanterns. The lantern bill caught me by surprise, by a lot, but now we are set for next time.

How would you do without power for three days?