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My highest item this week was $225 for a lot of Lego Minifigures new in package. But…..that’s not as great as it sounds….
I went all in and bought 150 Unikitty lego minifigure blind packs at Walmart a while back. I paid $1 per pack on clearance and had them listed for $20+shipping for a lot of 10, which was down from my original goal of getting $25 per lot. Had them listed for a couple months and didn’t sell a single lot. Not even an offer!
I got a message from a buyer inquiring about buying a handful of lots, and he eventually made me an offer for all of them. I decided to just cut bait and sell the whole lot for $225 shipped.
So after deducting shipping, paypal fees, ebay fees, promoted listings fees, and original purchase and sales tax, I made a whopping… $9.35. Whoopie dee doo!!
I’ve always drawn a clear line between being frugal and being cheap.
To me, being frugal means giving thought to every purchase to make sure you are getting the best “bang for the buck”. Being smart with money and being able to get most of what you want without hurting yourself financially. Common sense reigns supreme. My wife is an excellently frugal person and always has been since she was a young child. She taught me the wise ways of frugality. We take pride in paying a fraction of what other people pay for the sames goods/services.
Being frugal takes discipline and patience.Then there are cheap people. These folks do things or buy things because they are perceived as being a deal. They also do and/or avoid things because of fear of spending money. My mother and my mother-in-law are cheap people. Many “cheap” people in my experience are often obsessive compulsive buyers and spend WAY more money than they would if they weren’t cheap.
My mother used coupons, but she bought crap that no one wanted or needed because she “had a coupon”. I realized early on that manufacturers appeared to use coupons to offload undesirable merchandise, and our house was full of it. We never went on real family vacations – not because we couldn’t afford it, but because she just didn’t want to spend money – its like she had a deep seeded fear of spending money even when she could. It likely came from her childhood growing up as a Poor Wisconsin farm girl that didn’t even have indoor plumbing.
My mother-in-law bought a used Prius about 8 years ago. Afterwards she infamously told us she couldn’t come visit us as much as she didn’t want to put a bunch of miles on her “new to her” car. We lived a whopping 1.6 miles away from her….
She constantly avoids doing things that may cost her money, even if it is mere dollars. It’s like there is something wrong with her. She and her husband are quite well off financially – she has a masters degree and he has a PhD.
As an example just yesterday she called telling us she wanted to know if we were celebrating Cinco De Mayo (no) and if we were gonna go eat Mexican food. We offered that she could take some of the kids with her to do lunch. Now, because me and my wife weren’t coming that means she would have to pay for the kids meals – two of the four would have been free mind you if she went to the place we normally go, so her cost would have been $8 for 4 kids. She predictably fumbled around and decided to not do anything because she “couldn’t find any Cinco De-mayo deals”.She is also a hoarder that has filled almost her entire house with things she has bought at thrift stores. There are rooms that are literally filled to the ceiling that you cannot enter except opening to door to see it all. I dread the day it falls on us to deal with that situation.
So in closing, frugal people rule and are my tribe. I think most folks here at Scavenger Life are frugal.
Cheap people IMO have a possible mental disorder that needs treatment.More like uncomfortable silence while she works out the timeline back far enough to find a way for it to be my fault. Lol!
I love what Jay said in the pod cast:
” You don’t have to agree with what your partner says, but you have to at least respect it.”
I think my wife and I both struggle with this sometimes. It is hard to avoid feeling insulted or hurt when the one you love the most points out something you may not be the best at. I also tend to get frustrated when my wife misinterperets something I’m trying to convey.
One thing I don’t struggle with is apologizing. When I know I’m wrong, I humble myself immediately. It’s just the way its always been for me and I don’t understand why it is so hard for most people. My wife….not so much. Lol! It is probably the single most difficult thing in the world for her. I know for sure I can count on my fingers the amount of times she’s admitted being wrong. It is so funny when I can see the struggle just by looking at her that she’s connected the dots and knows she’s wrong, but cannot bring herself to admit it.
In my house this saying is very true:
“In a relationship there are two types of people: The person who is right, and the husband.”We’ve been married 14 years this month but we’ve been together for 21 years – high school sweet hearts since I was 16 and she was 15. We’ve experienced the highs and lows of life together and there is no other person in the world I’d rather spend this life with.
Items in Store 1141
Items Sold 23
Total Sales $873.50
COGS $197.25
Total Profit $676.25
Average profit $29.40
Average sales price $37.98
New Listings 73I was a listing BEAST this week! I knew I was doing pretty well, but I was still shocked when the number 73 popped out. That is the most I have EVER listed in a week. I also believe this is the most listed items I’ve ever had. To think I did that number on top of all this:
– Most of the chores/cooking as my wife is still recovering from giving birth and concentrating on baby.
– Helping two oldest kids crate train 2 dogs.
– Newborn baby in the house
– Took 6 year old to music class this week
– Coach 2 baseball games with 8 year old
– Potty training 2 year old (she’s got the pee pee part down pat after 2 weeks. Yay!)
– Full time day jobAnd I still had time to practice baseball with older 3 kids and even played dollhouse with the two year old yesterday for like 2 hours.
I’m darn proud of averaging 10 listed items a day over a week. That is attributed to having processes, the right equipment, and working as efficiently as humanly possible.
I create listings at work during my 10 minute breaks and during lunch at work.
I take photos and clean shoes at home in 15-30 minute power sessions when I can.
You’d be amazed at how much can be done in 10-15 minute intervals when highly motivated and dialed in.Sales are up and I hope that trend continues. The weekend was a dud though. I countered a few offers that I wish I would have accepted. The buyers turned out to be “one and dones”. I hate when buyers don’t make it clear their offer is firm. I could have broke $1k if I would have accepted a couple of decent ones.
Excellent news on the lifetime sattelite radio! I love mine! I originally was going to use it for a few months to make sure it didn’t lose stations and sell it, but I just love having satellite radio out in my ebay room.
From my research, never “update” if the receiver prompts you to update, and never call in to sirius to inquire about the unit. They try to kill all these units they can to rope you into a contract.
I had satellite radio in my car for a year – they are one of the sleaziest companies I’ve ever dealt with.
I’ve mentioned this before and I’ll mention it again – how does a fledgling company like Poshmark have the ability to negotiate such a sweet shipping deal with USPS while a giant company like ebay can only get commercial rates????
Shipping costs is quickly becoming the biggest issue on ebay. I routinely have buyers who pay $20 to ship a pair of shoes. My cheapest priority shipping is $8 for a padded envelope.
This is unsustainable and I think is driving alot of buyers off the platform.
My late shipments has been creeping up and I think these expected delivery dates are to blame. I typically take my packages to the post office right as they are closing on the last day of my handling time. And yet, I’m at 6.98% late items.
Occasionally I’ll run late and get a stray item printed and boxed up on the last day of handling after closing time and take to the post office the next day, but that doesn’t account for almost 7% of my sales.
That tight of a window is giving the post office WAAAAYYYY too much credit at being on time.I guess I have multiple “whys”
1. Ebay is my safety net if my day job ends again
2. Ebay as a part time gig made up the difference as my new day job was a 12% pay cut from my last job (but way less hours and was more safe).
3. Ebay allows me to not have to manage a strict budget. If we need something, we get it. We can debate the “wants”, but it would suck to have to debate the “needs”.
4. I just plain like doing it! The dream is to do what you love, and finding treasure where others see trash is what I love. It’s been that way with my hobbies well before I was selling on ebay. I think it was because I was a destructive delinquent child and I am subconsciously repenting. Lol!At this point I wish ebay had a system where sellers could report glitches through a form.
I am NOT calling customer service to report a glitch. We all know how that goes…Oh wow, those cards are pretty amazing.
I think if I would have seen these as a kid I would have been fine with the gore, but the “hanging the spy” one with the little kid in the noose would have got me.Do you get value from comparing your week to the same week from the previous year? Statistically it is not really relevant.My thought is that only negative mental impact is acheived from that metric.
Take for instance this week, you had a $1k week which is awesome, but with that $1673 number beside it the shine is really taken off.
I’d recommend you drop that metric and just look at monthly numbers year over year. I’d even take it a step further and look at trend lines so you don’t get stuck “in the weeds” looking at numbers.
When coaching, it is SOOOO frustrating when my own kids don’t show up with “attitude and effort”, which I also expect of them. My two oldest are both of the same attitude – they just expect to be better – without any of the work.
I hate to say it, but I’m usually far more proud of other kids on my teams than I am of my own kids. I’ve never forgotten what it was like to see rampant nepotism in athletics when I was a kid. I’m not about to be “that guy”. I coach whoever shows up and has the right attitude and tries hard. If my kids get left behind, so be it. There is no greater joy in sports than helping a shy, intimidated kid get their first hit in baseball or their first goal in soccer.
My kids NEVER ask me to go outside and practice with them, even with me constantly reminding them that it is an option. It is so frustrating. I want them to ask! I’ve learned to accept that they are going to succeed or fail on their own merits.
Oh and thanks for the tip ‘o the hat. Lol!
5 kids, full time job, kids are homeschooled, coach sports, and a very active ebay business.How do I do it? That’s simple: There are alot of things that DONT get done consistently.
Being late to things is more the rule than the exception.
We have mountains of unfolded clean laundry paired with similar mountains of dirty laundry.
The house is typically a mess since the kids. Never. Leave…
Yard work…HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! The neighborhood garden club must hate me.
There are always dirty dishes everywhere.
All of my walls have marker/crayon/pencil marks and also dried substances of unknown origin.
My ebay area is in a barely functional state.
I can’t in good conscience ask guests to take their shoes off anymore because our floors stay dirty.
I don’t scream out in pain anymore when I step on Lego or other small sharp plastic object – I just whimper quietly and die a little more inside. Lol!Yes, it is very stressful to constantly battle the never ending tidal wave of messes having 5 kids entails. I want to do it all but there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. One day We’ll have a clean tidy house and you know what – that will be a sad, depressing day that I do NOT look forward to.
I would not trade my chaotic life with my wonderful children and wife for any other life in the world!
