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My wife and I used to get the same thing all the time – we were living together for over 15 years before getting married.
We weren’t going to get married – but we started investigating setting up various legal structures for us (all our property was in one name, various assets were in single names, if one of us got sick it would be a pain at the hospital as we weren’t family or legal spouses). We talked to a lawyer, and basically it was going to be $1200 to setup legal documentation, or just spend $55 to get married to cover off everything we wanted done outside of being married.
Thanks for sharing this – I’m currently on TEAM BAG AND TAG for clothing, but it’s starting to eat up a lot of bin space…I’m going to move to TEAM HANG at my new place. My thoughts at the moment are to have a fixed high level hanging area (a heavy duty pipe near the ceiling) and then roller racks on the floor underneath to stack my clothes in 2 levels.
Storage space is weirdly the biggest challenge I keep having as I expand – it constantly needs to be re-assessed and organized.
Sometimes I think about how much stuff I have – I’m a minimalist to the most part, but when you start looking at everything you accumulated, it’s crazy the impact one person has.
I probably have 30 doors in my house – that is 30 doors, 30 door handles, some locks, 90 hinges, 30 door frames made of dozens of pieces of wood, screws, nails, etc. When you start thinking of it, we all probably go through millions of items in our lifetime.
It would be neat to know what is considered valuable from our era in 100, 200, or more years. Something trivial like a plastic shampoo bottle may be something someone displays in 150 years in their living room…
March 2019
The March numbers…
Listings – 611 (430 end of February)
Sales – 67
Sales Revenue (minus shipping/PayPal fees) – $2306.08
Total Listings added – 248
Inventory To List – approximately 225 (175 February)
Profit – $1018.44 + $59.39 Extra Shipping Charged
Expenses:
New items – $1020.09 (approximately 300 items – average $3.40 an item – shifting towards $50+ sale price items)
eBay Fees – $279.74 (paid in March, runs 15th to 15th on my account)
Supplies/Travel – $47.20 (gas)Lessons learned this month…
We didn’t think we would spend much time this month scavenging, but we ended up scavenging 4 of the 5 weekends this month. We had to travel a lot for different family events, and of course we had to stop in local thrift stores by those events while we were in those towns/cities. Net result is we have pushed well past our 500 listing goal…the thing we really like is that we have built our store just on pure profits – none of “our money” went into building it. We spent a few months of re-investing our sales dividends, and built something that is going to pay off for awhile.We have learned that in a 3 month period (well, closer to 10 weeks), with just working on sourcing/listing on weekends, it’s very easy to hit the 500 item store count. After 500 items, our “free listings” for our store (we get 250 U.S. listings, 250 Canadian for those wondering where the 500 listing store comes from…) are used up, and we are paying for additional listings. At this point we calculate once we hit 750 listings we would need to upgrade our store, which would give us 1000 listings (500 U.S./500 Canada). That will take a huge push, but isn’t impossible. We haven’t set any goals to get to 750 or upgrade our store yet, but have enough inventory to get there.
Next Steps for April…
Our excitement to build our business is still with us, however, we are starting to see we are neglecting other things in life that need to be done. Also, we continue to have a “death pile” that needs to be eliminated. I am not a procrastinator, so a death pile frustrates me. We have to focus this month on cleaning up our death pile, cleaning up our neglect, and slow down on the scavenging until we get re-organized. I believe we are getting very good at sourcing, therefore, we need to spend our time differently. We have been sourcing all day Saturdays (as time permits when we have other events), and listing all day Sundays. A full day of scavenging though is easily over a day of listing – probably closer to two days of listing – therefore we need to start scheduling our free time around that. Also, on Sundays we find we get into listing, and then around 7pm realize we have other tasks to do before the work week…we really need to plan our time better.
During March, with all the scavenging we have been doing the last few months, we’re relying less on looking up items on our phone – in fact the last few weeks I haven’t had to reference my phone a couple times scavenging. We’re also getting focused on a few categories that we are getting really good at. We’re getting picky, leaving larger items behind, and focusing on what we know will drive profit for our investment.
We made over $1000 profit in March…That is well above our “Survival” number of just over $800 but not at a comfortable living number of $1200. $1200+ profit would be my goal for April. Should be easy to get if we don’t spend any money this month and focus on listing our death piles.
Where our head are at…
We are enjoying the profit we are starting to see. We’ve never really had a store larger than 200 items for years, and to see what expansion does (several daily sales, larger weekly PayPal withdrawals) keeps us extremely motivated. For April we think that we will slow down quite a bit on scavenging, and get caught up on listings and other things around the house, but we get too excited with building our store…we’ll see what really happens as the month rolls on.
Pushing towards 1000 listings is something we’ll need to really plan for. We probably have the storage space for 1000 items in our current setup (a lot of large items have sold that we are not replacing that really helps free space) but if we go to say 1500, or 2000, it’s going to eat up our space. Plus, we have to move everything at some point. It is well organized in bins, so it shouldn’t be too bad, just will take up space in a truck. We currently sort things into bins by category/item type, then split them into specifics as required on the same shelf and each bin is labeled with what type of item is in it. Not sure how much more splitting we can do, or if we should just start numbering the bins and keep track of inventory that way. Just something to think about as we expand. The cool thing is that I know my new space at our new house is 7x larger than the current room we use at our current house, so I’m confident we can store up to 5000 items there – that’s years down the road though to get to that inventory level.
I think I grew up with too many grandparents and a great-grandparent telling me how bad the blitz was in England growing up during WWII, the Irish Revolution/Struggle, and various war stories that a recession doesn’t sound as bad as being bombed or shot at all day long…
I’ll eat Chef Boyardee all day long and suffer with less if it means my not being terrified or killed at any minute.
I think for myself, and maybe yourself, you come from a world in your career where numbers are blasted at you non-stop, and there is a “Scoreboard” for everything. That’s one of the challenges I have is that I’m focused on numbers, and in the end as long as the money is coming in, the nitty-gritty numbers don’t matter.
My wife is real bad – over-analyzing views, watchers, etc on her items and speculating why items don’t sell…I don’t focus on that as all that matters is 1 buyer – views and watchers don’t matter in the end.
I’m also starting to think “weekly” numbers is too tight – I’m going to start looking at things monthly before evaluating myself. We had a low sales week a couple weeks ago and if we didn’t focus on it, the monthly average is well above expectation.
I struggle with “thoughts” also – but find the best cure to supress the “bad” thoughts is to keep busy with other activities or listing.
After 3 months of working full time during the week, and spending all weekend on eBay, I finally hit the “burnout” wall…I’m still finding the right balance, but the crazy store expansion I’m going through has reached the reflection stage for this weekend…going to take this weekend for myself and other neglected tasks to re-fuel for the next push…
Like to see there response if you file a INAD with them…eBay will side with the buyer in any case under eBay’s general terms, no matter how many rules a seller may create.
I’ve seen similar statements – I’m not sure why eBay allows them as no seller can avoid returns or INADs by creating a crazy statement.
Vintage Cologne/Perfume has been the best profit items I’ve found the last few months. Just love finding it – it’s always dirt cheap, and they sell quickly and for good profit. Even drug store brands are worthwhile.
I guess people love their scent – and can’t change to a modern one.
The eBay calculator for Canada Post is great – I get up to 37% discount at Canada Post now so it’s way off. I’ve started to lower my “fixed” shipping costs to compete on competitive items with U.S. sellers, but keeping the calculator on for other items.
The tips I have are:
-check to make sure you don’t have any valuable coins – if you don, obviously sell them individually or if they are very valuable, get them graded
-once you know the coins are not that valuable, research the silver content of them – this is usually by year. Bundle the coins of the same silver content, and use that content in your title.
-weigh each bundle in oz, and in grams if selling internationally.
-listing would be the year range of the coins, silver content, weight, and total coins (3 nickels, 2 quarters, etc)Basically, you are selling silver…not the coins themselves.
I would be wary of international buyers…I sold 40 silver quarters once to a buyer from Brazil and it was a hassle.
If I found a cheap bulk deal of a lifetime (or even the year) in one of the categories I’m familiar with selling, I’d be all-in.
The way I see it is that all the time you scavenge for each individual item you sell is eliminated by the bulk purchase – not only are you making $ by buying cheaper, you are also saving time, a lot of it, by buying a bulk load. The time you would spend scavenging can now be spent listing. I also find listing similar items all in a row a lot quicker than random items.
The only cons I can think of is cash tied up in inventory (if you can’t afford it, it’s not worth the stress), and if you don’t have the storage space.
I’d also think of a quick flip for a portion of the purchase – bundle similar items like the ties (sell a dozen of the same brand – for the price of 7 or 8 individual ties), then get your $ back quicker to re-coup the original payout then focus on single selling.
Lots of ways to play it, but if I found hundreds of items I was into in one place at a very good price, I’d be knocking down the door…
I had a rough time for years with rural internet in my area – only in the last year do we have some competition.
Originally, the only company that had “high speed” internet was the phone company (Bell Canada) – it was horrible. Not even close to the speeds I was getting in the city, and would be constantly down (no service at all). It was VERY frustrating. We looked into satellite internet, but the costs were very high at the time.
We were lucky – with development in the area, a cable company (Cogeco) invested in putting lines down the street we live on – ever since we have been with them. Bell is also slowly adding fibre optic phone lines replacing the copper lines we currently have. Hopefully it provides even further competition.
There is a couple other locally run ISP options where you need an antenna device on your roof – most of the very rural people in our area have this – it looks like a “diamond” shaped road marker, but I hear the speeds and reliability are good unless it is snowing/raining/foggy.
I also looked into the cell data route – it’s too expensive for what I need compared to the cable company.
Where we are moving, we were lucky to have a cable line already installed into our house, so we have another cable company (Eastlink) supplying us there – it seems OK, but really haven’t put it to the test.
When I was in college, I had to take drafting courses along with a DOS-based AutoCAD classes. Manual drafting was still a thing at some employers at the time.
When doing a drawing by hand, we had to do all the call-outs, etc in ALL CAPS. I’ve used all caps when hand writing/printing ever since. It’s also a fall back for those of us with very poor penmanship if we want people to understand what we wrote…
I find older generations, like my parents tend to either have very nice handwriting, or go the ALL CAPS route on Christmas cards, etc.
I guess here in Canada we’re all like-minded…LOL
It’s even getting to the point where prescriptions may be free to everyone also (it’s already free for kids under 18, in college, or seniors). I guess we’ll leach off any drug innovations developed in the U.S. from paying customers.
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