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Time out on scrapping that copper there buddy.
Those look like some type of mixing valves. They could be worth ALOT more than scrap.I’ll do quick fixes if the item has value.
– gluing back shoes that have good value.
– magic eraser vintage toys or electronics.
– cleaning up leaky battery compartments.If an item is high dollar and needs significant repair, I tend to just list as-is. Typically high dollar electronics or mechanical devices have a very specific customer in mind – either a person who is well versed in repair with all the knowledge tools and parts, or an end user who wants a perfect restored piece.
If you try to shoehorn yourself in between those two typical customers you will likely alienate both. If you do a shoddy repair then you are likely to get an INAD.
Sometimes it is best to accept your role in the supply chain and sell to the professional repair person, unless you are willing to invest more time and money than it is worth for a one-off repair.
Occasionally I’ll try out a repair or three in a new genre just to test my interest. I learned real quick that I don’t want to do radio/stereo repair other than VERY basic fixes and cleanup.
I’ll still occasionally take on an arcade/pinball to do, but it is very rare now. Maybe one a year at most. Several of them I’ve changed my mind and just sold unrepaired and still made a nice profit.
Whoah… Those are some crazy nice RV’s.
I have zero desire to ever have an RV. I don’t want to drive one, don’t want to store one, and definitely don’t want to pay for one or the gas that is required to power it.
I am simply not a leisure driver. I want to get to the destination in as short of time as possible.If I had the money to buy one of those, I’d just fly to where I want to be and stay in a luxurious condo. $750k would buy me at least 750 weeks of really nice condo stays (likely much more if I played my cards wisely and took into consideration off seasons and monthly rentals). That is staying in a WEEKLY condo rental for 14 years straight. It is also almost 14 straight YEARS of staying in $150 a night hotels. Both options are longer than the useful lifespan of that RV!!!
We could make it work if I was home full time. We’d basically trade off on the ebay thing. I’d create listings while she did some School and games with kids and some chores, then I would do some chores/school with kids while she took pictures.
Pictures is the only thing she currently likes, but she says she would want to be able to do everything I do.
I disagree about the uninterrupted time thing. I work in 10-15 minute increments. I just now created listings for 5 items in 10 minutes on my phone in my car during break. Just have to take photos this evening. Sometimes if I’m lucky I get up to 30 minutes. After that I can feel my attention start to drift and I’m not as efficient.
This is the way I’ve had to get things done for years, because uninterrupted time simply does not exist in my house. I fought the process with kids 1-3. Once I had 3 kids though, I had to learn to adapt because working for hours at a time just wasn’t an option and I wasn’t getting ANYTHING done anymore.Just a few months ago I found out there is an entire work strategy based off of intense short bursts of work broken up by breaks called Pomodoro method.
https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-techniqueI talked with my wife over dinner last night about our interesting partner conversation we are having here.
I really would like my wife to become more involved in our ebay business. In the many DIY projects we’ve done over the years, I cover the highly technical and process driven side, while she is the “outside the box” creative side.
I’m really only good at taking what other people have done and improving it. I’m a fixer, mainly because that’s what I do as an Engineer – improve processes. Sometimes I don’t think I have a creative or visionary bone in my body.
My ideal living room is big, symmetrical, and bare bones white walls. Clean, simple….highly efficient but bland and boring. She is the one that will add the character, the interesting asymmetrical lines and shapes, the colors, etc. Make it into something other people want.
My wife is the kind of person that spends some time learning the ropes of a new skill, then branches out to do things with it that other people wouldn’t even think to do – blaze her own path if you will.
I NEED her in this business to help it move to the next level, to evolve. Sometimes I feel like my ebay store is like that room – bland and boring. If we are going to turn this into our livelihood it has to be more than that.
I personally don’t know what “that” would be. I think she would once she knew the business enough to do her thing.My personal test to determine if someone is cheap or frugal is what I call the toilet paper test.
Frugal people still buy the good toilet paper, but may try to use coupons or buy on sale to keep costs down.
Cheap people buy the cheapest paper thin crap even though it don’t work.
Only a truly cheap bastard will suffer WILLINGLY through bad toilet paper. Lol!
Get you one of the sirius boom box docks and put it in your ebay office like me. Then you can move it from car to office. You can get them pretty cheap on ebay without the receiver. Maybe someone on here has one in their death pile they can hook you up with.
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.
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