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My numbers for last week are too awful to even post since I wasn’t actively listing, but they seem to be recovering to their normal levels for this current week since I’m back to listing. Last week was a big week for us. We paid off our mortgage in full. It feels good to finally be done! My Ebay income definitely played a big role in paying the house off aggressively. We’ve been in this house 6 years, but I only started aggressively paying it off 21 months ago. I involved the kids every step of the way in an age-appropriate way so they could understand what a mortgage was and why mom and dad didn’t want to be paying ours for 30 years. Hopefully it made an impression!
Now my Ebay income will go into index funds for the most part a la Mr. Money Mustache.
Steve, I think this IS the dating site for scavenger-minded people lol. I know what you mean though. Jay and Ryanne are really lucky to have found their other scavenger halves! My other half has really grown in his scavenger ways since we met…makes me proud 🙂
Haven’t listened to the entire podcast yet, but about your cleaner…it sounds like maybe a substance abuse thing, especially since she promised to come the next day and then you literally didn’t hear from her for 3 days. I’d be a little wary of having her back into the houses unless I could somehow verify that she was clean. It could be a liability if she’s on something and gets hurt or even possibly leaves something around the property. Maybe I’m just a little wary right now because of hearing so much about the opoid (sp?) epidemic, but in some areas it’s really, really bad 🙁 With her being so reliable and then suddenly flaking out in an extreme way, I’d be super wary of a substance being involved. My friend’s daughter is like this when she relapses…she’s reliable when she’s sober/on the wagon, but totally flakes like that when she relapses.
Is there something like Merry Maids in your area where they would drug test their employees and carry the liability if they allowed someone not sober onto your property? That may be a safer way to go unfortunately.
Congratulations on paying off your mortgage Linda!! Best feeling ever! We’re right behind you…we should have ours done by Feb. 🙂
The NYC scavenger vacation stories made me think of when we took our kids to a camp out-of-town a few summers ago. It was the last week of July/1st week of August, and the VRBO we rented was on a street near what I guess were college apartments. Anyways, I found SO MUCH STUFF that we still have and use to this day that week. Apparently that’s the move-out/move-in time at colleges? I had no idea…it was so crazy. We could have taken so much more but we were constrained by what we could fit in our minivan.
Some highlights were a color laser printer that had literally only ever had a few pages printed on it, the Coach bag that I still carry every day, Coach sheepskin-lined boots that I wear every winter, a new-in-box sewing machine that my 11 year-old is crazy about, a ton of textbooks that I traded in on Amazon, JCrew and Lilly Pulitzer clothes, a Dr Dre Beatbox, photography lighting and a tripod still in the Amazon boxes (looked like a student bought them and then didn’t end up taking the class?)…it was nuts. One of the apartment complexes even had 2 clothing donation bins, but yet the students threw the clothes in the trash and in front of the trash bins instead. I put as many bags of clothing as I could into the bins so they didn’t end up at the dump. It was like a cornucopia of waste…scavenger heaven! I keep trying to convince the kids to do that camp again lol.
I just found that Ralph Lauren library tag in 2 more books! I’m going to lot up the 3 tags and sell them. I guess I’ll do it as an auction, because I have no clue how much they’d be worth. Crazy…I wonder how the person who dumped these came to have them.
I emailed you 🙂 There are some similar books that I found with it, so they’re yours if you want them.
Honestly? I found it straight-up dumpster diving lol. I was getting boxes from the behind the strip mall in my town (my source of all packing material). It was with a ton of other similar books including some Florida contractor books, so I assume one of the building contractors doing post-storm work on the building tossed them illegally in that dumpster.
If you want it I’ll send it to you Jay. Merry Xmas 🙂 You guys do a ton for the trash elf community so enjoy! Just PM me where to send it.
Relating to the package theft call on the podcast, I had packages stolen for the first time a couple of months ago. Our neighbor had the person on his security camera stealing the packages. The police couldn’t do anything though, as the packages were by the mailbox, so technically on the “right of way”. At this point, my only solution is a daily trip to the post office. It really stinks, but it’s the only way to ensure that the packages aren’t stolen. I don’t live in a busy urban area. The person who stole my packages was a vagrant on a bike. Prior to this, I’d leave piles of packages right by my mailbox for my mail carrier and I’d never had an issue.
Oh wow, I’d keep that scale for sure. I hate when my scale maxes out and then I have to use the bathroom scale while holding the package. A 150 pound scale for $10 is a steal.
Pretty much everything we have at this point was either thrifted, found on the side of the road or found actually dumpster diving. It seems like we find things for ourselves whenever we go out sourcing. I call it “reducing our life costs”. I take the kids along too, and they are really starting to get it. It’s good training for the future. Let someone else take the sunk cost hit…you can pick whatever it is up for pennies on the dollar at their yard sale lol.
I would have absolutely cancelled the sale, but I would have put it up for Buy It Now for an absurd price like $5000 instead of using an auction. Like you said, someone had a proxy bid and would have paid up for it had someone else put in a competing bid. I think an absurdly-priced BIN without “make an offer” would trigger either an absurdly high full-price sale or else a slew of unsolicited offer emails.
As for the ethics, someone was going to sell this jacket for over $1000. It might as well have been you. I don’t see an issue with cancelling as the pricing truly was an error.
For the “soap poo” have you considered putting them in a little pouch and using them up that way? They sell them at fancy soap stores like Basin, but you could just as easily make one for free using a washcloth. It’s actually called a “soap saver bag” https://basin.com/soap-saver-bag/
This week was quite good for me. I don’t sell particularly holiday-ish items either, so my sales are consistently about $600-$800 a week. I’m trying to spend on inventory at yard sales mostly right now so I can hopefully get that up to $1000 a week. My COGS this week is low because I’m still selling items that I got for free from a house that a friend was flipping. She is always buying and flipping houses so I’m hopeful that she’ll buy another one with good stuff in it 🙂
Nov. 12 – 19
Total Items in Store: 999
Items Sold: 50
Total Sales (Gross Profit): $933.81
Highest Price: $54.95 (Vintage Lingerie Item)
Average Price: $18.68
Returns: 0
Cost of Items Sold: $24
Costs of Items Purchased this Week: $140 (sourced a lot which is unusual for me!)Build A Bears (of any kind of animal…just as long as the y have the BAB) are a BOLO I just discovered…but UNSTUFFED. I’m constantly buying them at yard sales and thrift stores for between 25 cents and a dollar. My kids love the clothes for their own Build A Bears, and normally I just donate the stuffed animal back because they don’t really sell stuffed. Today I thought to look at unstuffed and sure enough, those sell decently well even used. My thought is to accumulate a pile of 10 or so and then make a “birthday party lot” for $100 or best offer. They are easy to unstuff. Just look for the part on the back seam where they “sewed” it with really thick string. Cut that string, remove the fluff and that’s it. They should be very light to ship too.
If you don’t have kids who are into Build A Bear clothes, you could sell the clothes too in outfits or in a lot…same with Build A Bear shoes. These all have tags in them from BAB so you can easily identify BAB vs. knockoff.
Bingo night sounds awesome! What a totally fun (and cheap) date night.
Better insulation is definitely on our list as soon as we’re done paying off the house. It’s a really worthwhile investment. It sounds like you guys did an awesome job of insulating your house.
This week wasn’t great for me numbers-wise. We were away all week though, so I didn’t list anything new. I still did about $500 in sales, but that’s a pretty low week for me. I had 10 day handling on my listings so I’m not sure if that hurt my sales or if it’s just that I wasn’t listing.
