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Not sure what happened with my post submission but thanks for posting it Jay. Here’s the video I was referring to. Looks like that link in my original post is broken.

These guys seem pretty transparent although they do have a patreon subscription group with mentoring. Supposedly Dailyrefinement’s average cost of good is $4 and I think technsports is somewhere around $5.

It sounds like technsports started out in a similar way as scavengers do and just kept building up his operation with the profits instead of taking the money out and investing it elsewhere. He said in one video that now he pays people to bring him a thousand pieces of clothing every week and pays $3-$5 a piece for them. I wouldn’t mind just being a shopper for him lol. I think they each have 2-3 employees.

[NC]

I guess you could say something like “here’s an offer for this item and if you want anything else in my store here’s a coupon to get a discount on it”. Not sure how the coupon works with the offer though. Wonder if the buyer can use the coupon to get a discount on the offer price?

[NC]

Weekly sales 7/25 – 7/31
Random Item Store
Total items 743
Items sold 24
New items listed 63
Gross sales $757.59
Net sales $443.91

Patch Store
Total items 2697
Items sold 48
New items listed 60
Gross sales $293.97
Net sales $164.58

Etsy
Orders 8
Gross sales $115.75
Net sales $98.38

Net sales total $706.87

Sold mostly bread and butter items this week and paid my subscription fees so that took $120 out of my net total. Also had a couple returns so it wasn’t the best week for me but I’m still happy with my numbers as they’re better than they were before I took the plunge to go full time.

I had someone come through and buy $170 worth of patches last night out of my patch store and that will reflect in next week’s numbers. I guess that’s the beauty of having a store with only one type of item – people can browse knowing they’re only going to see patches 🙂

I started checking out the Goodwill auction site this past week and it seems like it could be a decent place to shop for inventory if you can find listings that other people have overlooked. I won a lot of Harley Davidson patches for $25 that should turn into over $200 easy.

[NC]

Weekly sales 7/18 – 7/24
Random Item Store
Total items 704
Items sold 27
New items listed 63
Gross sales $1,272.51
Net sales $957.06

Patch Store
Total items 2685
Items sold 33
New items listed 51
Gross sales $272.76
Net sales $208.34

Etsy
Orders 9
Gross sales $89.80
Net sales $76.33

Net sales total $1,241.73

 

Had another great week for where I’m at currently. My best sale was a vintage Univox automatic rhythm instrument I got for free from a friend and sold for $400. I also sold a Winnie the pooh teapot for $100 and a Pepsi bottle opener for $80. So those 3 sales boosted my numbers substantially. I paid $2 for the teapot and a dollar for the bottle opener.

I’ve been sourcing a lot and settled on a few different things to look for at thrift stores that I can almost always find in everyone I go to.

I’ve been slacking on my patch store but plan to crank things up with it. I still have thousands and thousands of patches I need to sort through and list and that’s why I’ve been slacking. There are duplicates of most of the patches I have and they’re all mixed up so I need to get them organized and stop digging through to find ones I haven’t listed yet. I’m looking forward to getting through this death pile and on to buying new lots.

Stop selling on ebay? You could always stop listing but as long as you’re making money each month, why not just let it keep coasting and ship out what sells?

[NC]

I saw a wii at a yard sale a few weeks ago and asked how much they wanted. The guy said “I’ll take a dollar” lol. Sold the console for $80 and wii sports and wii sports resort together for $30.

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Weekly sales 7/11 – 7/17
Random Item Store
Total items 668
Items sold 17
New items listed 50
Gross sales $624.15
Net sales $403.83

Patch Store
Total items 2667
Items sold 45
New items listed 56
Gross sales $357.68
Net sales $256.93

Etsy
Orders 13
Gross sales $189.85
Net sales $161.37

Facebook Sales $600.00

Net sales total $1,422.13

Had another decent week with my eBay and Etsy stores and sold an old Fender Twin Reverb amp for $600 on Facebook. I got the amp for $10 so that was a great sale. Haven’t gotten quite as many items listed as I would like to with my 3 free weekdays but at least things are selling and my stores keep growing.

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Weekly sales 7/4-7/10
Random Item Store
Total items 635
Items sold 20
New items listed 44
Gross sales $957.49
Net sales $724.84

Patch Store
Total items 2656
Items sold 46
New items listed 56
Gross sales $348.20
Net sales $265.42

Etsy
Orders 5
Gross sales $109.95
Net sales $93.46

Net sales total $1,083.72

Had a great week of sales, happy to see this now that eBay is my main stream of income. A good chunk of the profits came from a cb radio I found at an antique store for $20. I put it up for auction since it was the only one of that kind available online and it got bid up to $265.

Hopefully I can start netting over $1,000 a week regularly

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Weekly sales 6/13-6/19
Random Item Store
Total items 585
Items sold 12
New items listed 53
Gross sales $266.06
Net sales $169.94

Patch Store
Total items 2572
Items sold 78
New items listed 158
Gross sales $294.45
Net sales $234.54

Etsy
Orders 7
Gross sales $40.90
Net sales $34.77

Net sales total $439.25

Last week was still on the slow side for me but the current week has been better. I started a 1% promotion on all my listings and that seemed to get things going. So far, I’ve been able to get about 20 random items and 20 patches listed on the days I haven’t worked with my dad this week. I still have some fine tuning to do with my process and I need to get an inventory system going with my random items. That should help free up some time once I have that in place.

 

What I do to make sure the mail person always picks up is put a note in my mailbox that says ‘please grab packages off the porch” and raise the flag. I’ve tried scheduling pickups online and they just drive right by so I had to think of a way to get their attention.

 

[NC]

30 year loan for $96,000 at 3.7% =

Monthly payment of $441.87

You’d pay a total of $63,073.80 in interest if you didn’t pay it off early.

So do you want to pay $63,073.80 in order to have access to $96k?

If you were to invest $441.87 a month in an index fund that averages 10% (what the stock market has averaged) you’d end up with $872,219.69 after 30 years.

I wouldn’t personally take the loan based on those numbers. And I wouldn’t take the loan and invest it all in stocks either. You’re not guaranteed that the market is going to go up (even though it always has in the long run) but you are guaranteed to have to pay the money back. What happens if you take the loan and then something happens to your health or some other tragedy that takes away your ability to earn an income? The loan sits there waiting to be paid off but accrues interest in the meantime. Debt-free is the way to go

 

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Weekly sales 6/13-6/19
Random Item Store
Total items 544
Items sold 14
New items listed 37
Gross sales $464.48
Net sales $334.84

Patch Store
Total items 2518
Items sold 24
New items listed 158
Gross sales $185.93
Net sales $145.55

Etsy
Orders 12
Gross sales $124.75
Net sales $106.04

Net sales total $586.43

Not a bad week at my current level but looking forward to listing a lot and building my stores and sales. Patch sales keep slowing down but I bet they’ll come back when it starts getting cold again. I did some thrift shopping this past week and it was reassuring to find lots of items I could sell. Don’t think I’ll run out of places to scavenge any time soon. I’m curious how big my stores will get and how quickly I’ll be able to build them once I have a lot more free time after this last week of working a job. My first goal is to get a thousand items in my random item store and three thousand patches listed. Time to get to work

[NC]

Thanks, yeah IT support is tough. And corporate life doesn’t appeal to me at all. I am looking forward to not having to check in with anyone about anything and like you said, seeing more results by putting in more effort with eBay is much more rewarding than working harder at a job and hoping the right people see your efforts and respond positively.

[NC]

Thanks Simon! I’ve been keeping up with your posts and it’s been motivating to see what kind of money you’re bringing in. Gives me hope that I can do the same eventually. You’ve also made me not feel crazy for having a couple hundred hats listed lol. I’ve been ramping up my hat game lately

[NC]

Thanks, yeah I’m a numbers nerd and have spent a lot of time reading and learning from the financial independence bloggers. I really enjoyed the podcast you guys did with JL Collins.

With my current eBay averages and the income I’ll get working with my dad, I’ll make enough to keep the lights on. Now that I kinda HAVE to list to pay the bills, I believe I’m going to start making a lot more from eBay. And there are so many things I deal with in my job that I won’t have to think about anymore, I think I’m going to have a lot more energy and mental clarity to direct towards the business.

I will now have 3 weekdays completely open to devote to selling things vs a few hours here and there so I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with the extra time. I felt like if I didn’t just go ahead and put in my notice, I was going to keep saying “one of these days” for the next 30 years.

Who knows, I may have just made a bad decision. At least I won’t have to think “what if” anymore and will know if this was the right thing to do or not. I guess worst-case scenario is I work with my dad more and learn a trade that fewer and fewer people are getting into these days.

I do have enough cash set aside to live on for about a year, so there’s that.

[NC]

Welp, I quit my job today…

I’ve been wanting to for a long time and decided to just rip the bandaid off and put my two weeks notice in.

My boss is cool and sounded happy for me, he even asked if I’d be willing to stay on as a “consultant” so I asked him to let me know what that would look like. We’ll see.

My job was in IT and mainly desktop support, so I don’t know what I’d be consulting for lol.

 

I’m not killing it on eBay at the moment but I feel confident that I will start to once I am able to put in 8 hours a day.

I’m going to work with my dad a couple days a week remodeling houses starting out so I’ll at least have that income to lean on.

I’m looking forward to the freedom and want to thank you guys for the podcast cause I likely would’ve felt like I couldn’t transition to doing this full time and been stuck in the clutches of a desk job for the next 30 years.

[NC]

Weekly sales 5/30-6/5
Random Item Store
Total items 521
Items sold 9
New items listed 14
Gross sales $284.77
Net sales $117.36

Patch Store
Total items 2384
Items sold 25
New items listed 56
Gross sales $163.08
Net sales $69.62

Etsy
Orders 8
Gross sales $90.85
Net sales $77.22

Net sales total $264.20

It’s looking like the patch market is going down for now. I was selling $50-$100 a day worth of patches a few months ago. I’m kinda surprised I’ve been able to make as much as I have from the patch store though with it only having a couple thousand listings and prices being so cheap. Once I get my listings up to 10,000 or so it should be a nice income stream.  I had a $225 sale in my random item store yesterday so next week’s numbers should be up at least.

One of my best finds ever was a box of stuff that people were going to throw away at a yard sale. It was a bunch of dusty old electronics and I just threw them in my car not thinking much about it. When I got home and looked them up I realized they were super rare vintage CB radios and I sold them for parts for over $700 total. Haven’t done a lot of dumpster diving though except for getting boxes.

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