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Brilliant! I’m always jealous of these guys as anyone had the opportunity that they found!
I agree – too many stories of Porch Pirates scare me from leaving stuff out for pick-up.
However, if the delivery driver is at my house, I load up there arms with anything I have for them to take with them back to the Post Office.
There was a story in Canada a few months ago about a guy who was living off of “manufacturing” points. He found a crazy loophole with one retailer.
The Canadian Mint, which makes all the coins in Canada, sells collectable coins at face value. For example, you can buy a $500 collectable coin for $500. This $500 is worth $500 and any bank has to accept it as much.
What this guy was doing was buying up these coins for face value, using various credit cards, collecting the points, then turning in the coins to pay off the balance on his credit cards, keeping the rewards. He would do it over and over day after day.
Eventually, he was doing it so much, that someone wondered why so many oddball coins that were just released were being deposited in banks, narrowed it down to him, and figured it out.
I’m sure there are similar ways to buy something on a card, turn it into equal cash, pay off the card but keep the points/miles/benefits.
I’m cautiously dipping my toes in different waters for “work”. I’m at the age (early 40s) where I’m planning retirement, have a decent nest egg built up, but curious what other ways I could make income that I enjoy more. If I lost or quit my job tomorrow, we’ve decided that we would look in different fields of work, and downsize our life to live off the money we’ve slaved to earn – at the same time looking at different experiences to make money to pay the re-occurring utility bills, food, insurance, etc.
I personally enjoy setting up home entertainment systems, putting them together, and teaching people how they work – and I have found that I can make money doing this. I only advertise my services on CL and other classified sites, and found it to be a good start to gauge the size of a business I enjoy. My wife has similar “side gigs” that are bringing in money as well – we’re just waiting to jump or be pushed into the lifestyle. I have a lot of family members that for their lives just lived off of income from random work they created for themselves – various artists, and self-taught oddball skills are what I grew up knowing as “careers”.
You at least need to test the waters with what you like or even love to do – and see where it goes. I completely understand the hesitancy to jump in (I’m very hesitant), but every journey starts with a first step.
I see it more as gambling with “posted odds”.
I sell a lot of older/vintage/out of production items. These tend to have a set sales rate and price.
For an item that sells for approximately $50 10 times a week, I know if I list my identical/similar item for $35, it has a 99.9% chance of selling in a couple days. Put that item up for $60, the odds go down put it will sell in a few months.
Other completely unique items are a complete gamble – with no odds that it will sell, and for how much.
With my grandparents being born and raised in Leeds and Sheffield, this conversation is bringing back good (and bad) food memories! I still seek out Bourbon Cream biscuits, HP and other brown sauce, and I go through PG Tips like crazy!
I haven’t been to the UK for awhile to stock up on tea – around here, PG Tips is premium and 20 bags sell for $8 at Walmart (which up to recently owned Asda – so they must have been making a killing off me!).
My wife and I dream of winning a gold gavel one day on Bargain Hunt – just to go shopping at one of the antique fairs would be great for me.
When I retire, I’m coming over to rent a caravan and spend a summer in Blackpool, and the winter in Benedorm. The caravan parks we see on TV look like our speed, and those areas look like good scavenging areas. The people on “Bargain Loving Brits” are my type of people!
Great job so far! Those are good numbers – what is your Australia/International shipping ratio?
I would love to scavenge and drive a road train for a few months around Australia. I can’t believe that tourists can just get a license and drive a road train! I use to really enjoy watching Aussie Pickers here in Canada – wish they were still making new episodes. It was always interesting to see things like Tire Swans and vintage outdoor clothes dryers have value in another country, and what scavenging is like in rural Australia.
I have lots of great customers in QLD – hopefully you are finding the same around the world as well.
I think a lot of the “fishers” on here should also realize that some of the sharing is well appreciated.
The old saying “you can give a man a fish, and feed him for a day, or your can teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime” goes for some of the tips shared on this forum.
A steady stream of extra catches comes my way these days as my scavenging net is wider and I know more about other species to fish for!
I would estimate a good $100 to $150 a month extra I make these days on items I wouldn’t have given a second look at based on the sharing of finds and what sells well on this forum. Scientific Calculators are something I thought was worthless these days that someone turned me onto on this forum and I sell a couple a month now. There are countless other oddball items like this I now go hunting for.
SA around here is taking a hit for their religious/political viewpoints. Lots of press the last few holidays about various businesses not wanting them on their premises with the kettle program because of their viewpoints.
In my area, only one of the 6 SA stores have closed – the one that did was in a very bad location. SA has a lot of good deals, but the political/religious extremes they are promoting in my area disappoint me and they probably are slowly killing themselves with the extremist views and protests.
Just watched a little documentary on the start of the SA – kind of interesting how they started out as part of the anti-drinking Temperance movement and would actually get in brawls in England at bars and breweries to try to stop the sins of drinking. They called themselves an army as they felt they had to go into battle to fight sins and evil as they saw it.
07/10/2018 at 10:37 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 368: Is Our Business an eBay Hack? #45002Paypal is still somewhat integrated with ebay.ca – when I print using Paypal, all the shipping/tracking information still gets populated into ebay automatically when the label is generated.
Since Paypal is officially partnered with Canada Post, they provide some good shipping history information on Canada Post’s website once you have an account. You can also use the savings you earn to print non-ebay labels as well. Find this great for sales off ebay or personal shipments.
The only issue I see with switching would be you need to earn a savings level with Canada Post – therefore, you will be getting only slightly discounted shipping the first few months until you earn a higher savings level.
eBay will side with you when a buyer uses a re-shipper on anything and admit it. They have provided usually a false phone number (it is not there phone number – usually the re-shipper) and shipping address. False address/contact info is against eBay’s user agreement. Using re-shippers is against eBay’s user agreement as well.
As long as you shipped to the address provided, and tracking says it arrived, you are covered. PayPal will cover you as well for the same reasons.
06/28/2018 at 3:58 pm in reply to: marbles, are any of these valuable? should i just sell as a lot? #43898@Jay – the marble market isn’t what it was a few months ago. The blue one was easily $1 million in March, but unfortunately it is now only worth about 14 cents.
Marble futures are riskier than Bitcoin. Haven’t been in the marble trade FT since Grade 4.
@Ryanne – I think I would just sell them as a lot. I had some vintage marbles a few years ago that I couldn’t sell – they made good drainage in my flower pots and I can dig them out and wash them if the market goes up. Some of the decorative/swirl ones may catch someones eye.The only times I’ve done eBay FT have been when I’ve been laid off from work, and I also had unemployment coming in as a safety net (about $400-$450 a week). The unemployment checks kept me afloat if I had a bad week.
I personally don’t think I can do eBay full time without other work. I like having a steady paycheck to pay my bills, and even when I was selling on eBay FT and collecting unemployment checks it was stressful some weeks.
My advice would be if you think that you will get laid off work, you may want to wait it out and collect whatever government assistance (either unemployment, business assistance, or both from your state) and test drive doing eBay FT with the safety net.
The discipline, and roller coaster ride of income is something you need to think about. I personally don’t plan on becoming a FT seller until I am retired, collecting a pension as a safety net, and having eBay income more as “fun money” from a hobby instead of a job.
I think you are in financially good shape for your age, but you may want to eliminate more debt before going FT on eBay – it may eliminate some of the stresses of being a FT seller and slow weeks.
@Siglini – the listings look good. If you know the year for the IHOP shirt it may be helpful, but if unsure I would leave it as is.
A couple “speed” or time tips I have for T-Shirts are:
-if you are stuck for time at a store, look at black t-shirts only. Most concert or wrestling shirts are black – it will save you lots of time going through the other shirts if you cherry pick the black ones.
-I use to lay shirts flat to take photos, but found I spent a lot of time getting the wrinkles out – I went to a torso mannequin and it sped up my photo taking. I use clothes pins to make the shirt tighter on the dummy if it is too large.
-I pack/store my shirts in large Ziploc bags and write the description on them and place them vertically in bins by category (concert, sports, wrestling, other are how I have my bins labeled).
-When they sell, I have poly mailers the exact size of the Ziploc bag that they slip into, and make them small enough (in Canada it’s 2cm, or just under a inch) to be mailed as standard “letter” mail. Some larger shirts you will need to push the air out of the Ziploc to make them small enough.
Shirts are my bread ‘n butter items – always sell consistently, cheap to find, bring in OK profit ($10-$15 for most – your not going to get rich, but pay the bills) and cheap if the buyer has an issue (return postage or a total loss isn’t that expensive).
One T-Shirt category I do very well on is vintage WWE/WWF/WCW or other wrestling T-Shirts.
Pre-2000 are easy to sell for $30+. Newer ones also sell easily. The rarer the wrestler, the more you will get (I’ve sold some hard to find shirts from the 90’s in the $150 range).
Child sizes are harder to sell, but do sell eventually.
Another category I found some success with is fast-food restaurant T-shirts. Lots of places have limited time promos that they make their employees wear shirts for (even for one day) – the older, the better, but newer ones sell at $10-$15 quickly if in good shape. Avoid the greasy or well worn shirts in this category.
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