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Hi David: I’m in St. Pete, Florida and my dream is to someday move to Colorado. I spend time on Zillow etc. looking at houses in Colorado and they seem so expensive! Where is affordable to live in Colorado that would be near Denver & the mountains. I was sort of thinking if I could find somewhere between Breckenridge & Denver, I’d be in heaven – but the prices are so crazy high. Point me in the right direction – where should I be looking? Also, do you think Utah is more affordable than Colorado? Thanks! Katie.
wow that is a big improvement.
I used to use Picasa for stuff like that, it worked fairly well and was free but I don’t think it exists anymore – I think Google bought it.
Now I just use iphones to take photos with no photo editing.
I think if I ever got into really selling higher end vintage items, I’d consider doing the photo editing again.
Really nice work.
P.S. the trick is to keep it interesting so you can list for longer stretches of time.
I make 20 drafts at a time using my pre-made templates.
My daughter takes pictures on her iphone or mine.
Then I finish the drafts.Video: I watch hulu or you tube while I list. I’ve binge watched Broad City, The Handmaiden’s Tale (which is coming back again soon!), and a few other hulu shows – like the one about the fortune teller mob which is weird but interesting enough while I’m listing, I think it is called Shut Eye.
Podcasts: And lately I’ve been binge listening to the Dave Ramsey podcast, but I also love This American Life, Stuff You Missed in History, Nerdist, Making It with Riki Lindhome, My Dad Wrote a Porno, Anthropocene, The Hilarious World of Depression, The Moth, The Minimalists, And the Year of Polygamy Podcast.
When my daughter is taking pictures we listen to Bruno Mars or Justin Timberlake on Pandora. And sometimes I introduce her to obscure stuff from when I was a teenager – like Erasure doing Abba cover songs – weird & funny stuff you can find on you tube.
P.S. I’ve been a meal prepping machine. Yesterday, I took a break from listing and spent the day cooking. I made turkey with some curry spices, stuffing, vegetables, etc. so we have little packs of curry thanksgiving dinners with cranberry sauce in the packs for this week. Yum. I like to hear the meal prepping part of the podcast when you do it.
My daughter had a bunch of friends over on Sunday I fed them all with stuff I made – I felt so thrifty because normally we would just order pizza for that type of thing. So I probably saved $50. Score.
4/15/18 – 4/22/18
Total Items: 2,821 (542 + 942 + 1059 )
Total # Sold: 90 (21 + 46 + 20 + 3)
Total $ Sold $1,532 ($340 + $837 + $324 + $31)
Average Price: $17
Money Spent: $300
Listed: 81
Higher $ Sales: (between $38-50): Soft Surroundings, Vineyard Vines, Vtg Princeton Sweater, Eileen Fisher, Sundance, Anthropologie, Lafayette 148, Ann Taylor, St. John, AftcoI sold a bunch of men’s shorts because I got to a 1/2 off sale at the thrift shop late and the women’s section was picked over so I tried the men’s section and found a bunch of shorts from Vineyard Vines, Lululemon, Aftco, and other fishing and golfing shorts.
My daughter is pretty much taking all the photos for me now which is great. I pay her a $1 an item and we’re both pretty happy with this arrangement.
I have a bunch of things I need to get listed (death piles) and I have a bunch of stuff that I just need to purge from our personal storage so I need to work on this backlog type of stuff to get it moving and clear some space for ebay storage.
I’ve been doing my new listings as free shipping and free returns, I’m not thrilled about this, but I figure with the clothing sales, it probably helps. I’m not doing this for my unique vintage hard goods type of stuff.
While I like the interviews, I was happy to hear a regular Jay & Ryan show again. 🙂
Hey – sorry this fell off my radar – here are my last 4 weeks:
March 28-24: 80
March 25-31: 77
April 1-7: 21
April 8-14: 156I’m trying to hit it hard on the listings. I’ve been trying to pay down our debt and I’ve depleted our checking and savings, so I need to make some extra money to build those accounts back up quick!
04/08/18 – 04/14/18
Total Items In Stores: 2,795 = (945 + 544 + 251 + 1055)
Items Sold: 69 = (43 + 11 + 13 + 2)
Total Sales: $1,188 = ($696 + $228 + $243 + $21)
Highest Price Sold: $75 Mother Jeans; $43 Madewll Dress; $38 quilt; $35 Bryn Walker top, $41 Sadek mugs
Average Price Sold: $17.21
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $ 200
Number of Items listed this week: 156My 14 year old daughter has been great at helping me get pictures taken and it is working out well; she wants to earn extra money so this week she kind of pushed me to list more.
I’ve been bingeing on the Dave Ramsey podcast, and while I don’t agree with him on a lot of things, the thing about getting debt paid off quickly is hitting home for me. I’ve paid off our credit cards and have been putting a lot of money towards a 2nd mortgage and an office credit line. My husband is freaking out a little because the checking and savings accounts are down because of the payment towards debt. So this week I’m focusing on making money at work and with ebay. We still haven’t put our house for sale because I don’t think we have a good plan for after we sell it and I think it is going to sell quickly, so we’re discussing what is next.
A week or so ago I went over to Orlando with my sister and got about an hour to check out the Goodwill bins over there, they are different than the St. Pete bins. They have the blue table-ish carts, while St. Pete either has racks or the dreaded gaylord bins. It was just as aggressive. The bins aren’t my favorite place to source, but for bread and butter stuff like Tablots, Ann Taylor and Chicos, the bins are my jam.
It felt like a slow week but it was actually pretty good for me.
Posting late – here is 4/2/18 – 4/8/18:
Total Items in Stores: 943 + 538 + 218 + 1055 = 2,754
Items Sold: 25 + 7 + 7 + 2 = 41
Total Sales: $530 + 119 + 150 + $35 = $834
Highest Price Sold: $90 Eileen Fisher jacket; $44 Boden Dress; $40 Hot Topic Pants
Average Price Sold: $20.34
Returns: 1
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $50
Number of items listed this week: 21I’m still hitting my old goal of at least $700 week, but not hitting my new goal of $1,000 a week. This week was a couple hundred short of the weeks during the last month or so. One reason for my slow week is that my sister came to visit so I had a busy time and didn’t get much listed.
I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of listening to Dave Ramsey podcasts. I had Baby Step #1 in my pay pal account from eBay so that was done no problem. Sadly, I’m 47 and on baby step #2, I feel like I’ve been pretty stupid with money for a long time; happily, I’ve seen the light and have been throwing money at the stupid debt and have made good progress and feel motivated to get through baby step #2 as fast as I can – we have a very minor amount of credit card debt, but a 2nd mortgage on the house that is a bit more. We are in the process of getting our house ready to sell, if/when it sells, then the 2nd mortgage will get taken care of; and we should be able to accomplish Baby Steps #3 and #6 with the money from the house. We’re basically going to sell our big house with a mortgage and downsize to a smaller house that we buy for cash with no mortgage. My goal is to be debt free and own a house outright by the time I’m 50. We also have some money in retirement accounts (baby step #4) and have pre-paid college funds paid in full for the kids (baby step #5). Then at that point, my goal is to start saving as much money as possible (baby step #7). My husband is 13 years older than I am, so he is 60 now. He’d like to retire from our business and sell our office building on the sooner side of things which, realistically, probably means somewhere between 5-10 years, in that case, we’d go forward doing the ebay thing because we’d be debt free, own a house, and have some money socked away. That’s the plan anyway.
I upped my 3rd ebay store to the $20 a month level. I wish they had a level between $60/month and $300/month. So I have one $60/month store and 2 $20/month stores so that’s $100/month for, I think, 1000 + 250 + 250 = $1500 listings. My $60/month store is just under 1000 listings, I think the math is that to make it worth jumping up to the $300/month level you should have 3000 listings. So having three stores is kind of my fix; it also lets me try different things with the different stores and to have some security in knowing if one store got shut down then I’d still have the other 2.
Posting late – here is 3/26/18 – 4/1/18:
Total Items in Stores: 927 + 514 + 220 + 1055 = 2,716
Items Sold: 27 + 10 + 9 + 1 = 47
Total Sales: $753 + $206 + $162 + $19 = $1140
Highest Price Sold: $45 Tommy Bahama Shorts; $50 Pyrex Bowl; $38 J. Jill Dress
Average Price Sold: $24.25
Returns: 3
Money Spent on New Inventory This Week: $50
Number of items listed this week: 77My son has had severe social anxiety since middle school. For almost a year, he has been in a D&D therapy group and he loves it. NPR (or maybe just the local station, I’m not sure) did a story about it – here’s a link to the story:
http://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/post/negotiating-dragon-role-playing-games-group-therapy
