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Hi,
My wife and I do a lot of different things. I run an insurance agency (I am the only employee and the office is next door to our house). My wife and I run our small town’s newspaper. About two years ago we did ebay for a year. We each had our own account. I sold tools and clothing. She sold clothing exclusively. She made more money than I did but she grew very tired of selling clothes and just stopped. When she stopped I did too as I was making only about $200/month profit and working many hours. I love buying and selling and she does too. She is also a real estate broker but not currently doing that. We dabbled in rental properties for a number of years but sold several of them. We have one rented, one that is not habitable, and one we turned into our office next door. We have no employees. So we do the newspaper and insurance for now. We are barely getting by. We want to get back into buying and selling. Life is just more fun when we do that. I hope to start listening to the podcasts and get to selling! We have a real wanderlust for changing what we do to make money, but for 16 years we have been self employed and I don’t ever want to work for someone else again. Sometimes I feel guilty about changing what we do over and over. And there is guilt about not making more money than we do. I am not enthusiastic about insurance, never really was. Kind of fell into it. We have always loved buying and selling and trading. I guess we’ll see what happens. I refuse to give up and barely make it any longer.
Chris -
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Welcome! So many questions.
–what part of TX? (I’m from Houston)
–Do you own the local paper? or just run it? Isn’t that a job?
–No guarantees when working for yourself, but if you’re insurance business pays the bills, can’t you ease into eBay just just adding 30 new items a week? -
Ryanne – Putting kids through college and financing the newspaper. We will look at bills. Why barely getting by? 100% commission on ins and newspaper, and we don’t sell aggressively enough, also, small population here (700 people).
Jay – We live halfway between Houston and Dallas, in Normangee. My wife and I are both from Houston, me from Spring and her from Santa Fe. We own the paper (make payments, so it has a note). Between the insurance and newspaper, we pay the bills, but aren’t saving and having trouble paying taxes. Yes we could do 30 listings per week. I still have clothes I could sell (old stock).
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I tell ya, you would be surprised that you CAN buy them. Why? It’s a heck of a lot of work and people burn out. We bought ours in 2015. We had never done it before, lol. People told us we were either stupid or crazy to buy a newspaper.
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95K. Well, we have gotten faster at making the paper. But it’s still time consuming. I didn’t mention, but ours is a weekly, it comes out once a week on Wednesdays. We do the paper and the insurance in the same office so we can cover for each other as needed. The insurance is really a 9-5 M-F thing where as the paper is more 7 days of unpredictable times. During the school year there is a lot to go to and cover especially high school sports. The insurance is mine really, the wife ins’t involved with it, but it takes both of us to do the paper. We build it Sat-Monday, print on Tues, distribute on Wed.
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Historically, no. My grandmother owned this paper for 50 years. They did Real Estate with the paper. The previous owner’s spouse had a job, making that a two income family. Our town is so small, most self employed people here do more than one thing to make it.
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