Best Offer, Best Life! Leveraging The Power of Online Yard Sales
Get Paid to Get Organized!
5 Ideas for What Household Items to Sell Right Away and What to Avoid
by Deb Colameta
Watch Deb Colameta talk about her new book and how she found a formula for financial success by decluttering her home and leveraging the power of online yard sales.
Her #1 best-selling book Best Offer, Best Life! uses entertaining anecdotes to motivate people to sell household excess through social media.
Online yard sales are an easy way to monetize the excess items that most of us have gathering dust and taking up valuable space in our homes. Online selling platforms like Facebook Marketplace and OfferUp are available to all of us and you can get started today, for free. First, you just have to pick which items you’d like to sell. Consider selling something in each of the following five categories.
1. Exercise equipment has been very popular to sell lately, especially during quarantine. People are home more and visiting the gym less. Many are trying to outfit their houses with exercise pieces that don’t break the bank. Plus, with supply chain issues in manufacturing and delays related to COVID-19, it can be difficult to find sports gear.
In the past few weeks, I’ve successfully sold three bikes that my family members have outgrown. We sold them for close to the original purchase price, after owning the items for years. That’s an excellent return on investment. Since affordable bikes are especially difficult to find these days, the buyers seemed grateful to have them. Selling the bikes also helped clear space in our garage for our car. Everyone benefits.
2. Home décor is another popular category of items to post online. Many people like to update their interior design and are looking for a way to get rid of perfectly lovely items that may feel new in someone else’s home. Decorative wall art, clocks, mirrors, lamps, holiday decorations, accent furniture and tables generally sell quickly when priced right.
3. Appliances are typically another lucrative genre for online yard sales. It can be difficult to dispose of large appliances. You might have to schedule and pay for a special trash pickup. They are impossible to move, unless you have a truck and the required physical strength. Also, donation places typically have strict intake rules and may only accept appliances that are a few years old. By selling a big appliance, you quickly gain a noticeable footprint of space in your home, no matter the final financial gain.
Smaller appliances clutter your counters, but someone else who’s starting a new household or outfitting a seasonal home might be glad to buy the items you no longer use.
4. Children’s items can be a bit difficult for the novice online yard sales seller, but the payoff can be great. Luxury brand strollers and barely used baby gear could yield a tidy profit. I sold a low-mileage carriage that my baby did not enjoy and another mom was happy to have a like-new stroller for grandmother’s house. If you find a “freecycling” group in which you can give away the items, you are still creating more space in your home. There’s significant value in that.
5. Electronics can become outdated quickly and can generally be difficult to sell, but there are some things that retain value, such as flatscreen televisions, computer monitors and things that are new in the box. I recently sold a like-new DSLR camera for close to its original price of $500 because I bundled it with several desirable accessories. For electronics that don’t sell, you could explore an app like Decluttr which repurposes your items. My readers have reported great results with a decent payment structure.
I recently collected a few of our old tablets and did a factory reset in order to prepare them for sale on Decluttr. However, I noticed that after being cleared, they were in better working order and I ended up repurposing one for my preschooler. By avoiding purchasing a new device for her, I saved $400. This is all part of the online yard sale lifestyle and being more mindful about what we really need to purchase.
Avoid starting your online yard sales journey by selling items that have any sentimental value. If you’re hesitant about selling something in particular, set it aside in an area that is just outside your living space. Make a note on the calendar to revisit the item after a month or two. Have you used it during that time? If not, it’s time to sell it to someone who will. This is the best sort of recycling and potentially receiving money in exchange feels good, too!
Not everything will sell quickly or at all. If it doesn’t sell, you haven’t lost anything besides the few minutes it took to post it online.
For guidance on writing your ad, pricing tips and marketing advice to help sell your item, my #1 best-selling book Best Offer, Best Life! provides a plan for success with online yard sales. It’s also available as an audiobook so I can read to you as you purge your space!
How did my son’s remote learning lead us to make $500 in just days? We recently decided to reallocate space in our home to accommodate virtual classes and working at home for the foreseeable future. My son completed his schoolwork mostly at the kitchen table last spring as the weeks of quarantine turned into months. Clearly, this was not going to cut it for the fall term. And you don’t have to be a feng shui specialist to know that setting up a workspace in his bedroom would not help him disconnect from school at night. Instead, we cleared out an entire room in our home, which yielded a pile of working items we were ready to sell using online yard sales.
While I’ve personally made many thousands of dollars selling our household excess over the past few years, the true financial gain comes from the immeasurable amount of money that we have saved. Purging our home has been transformational in every respect and impacts our spending habits overall. It allows us to live with financial freedom and more space in our home. The online selling process is easy to begin and helps to cultivate a new lifestyle of lighter living with fewer, finer things.
Deb’s podcast Upcycling with Deb is available on Apple Podcasts.
She also runs live workshops and webinars (DEBinars) that help people learn how to achieve selling success online as well as a communication consulting business.
For more information, please visit www.TheDebSite.com . You can find Deb on Facebook and Instagram here @DebColameta