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Hello from Ireland for the next three weeks. It’s beautiful and bustling here in Dublin while our job lasts, but we’re really looking forward to getting a car and driving around the more rural areas. Next update, we can get back to doing our normal updates about our store and sales. We have a lot to talk about from the past several weeks.

But now we’re excited to post this conversation with Rhianna and Edgar who are scavengers that live in Idaho and have dabbled in eBay and Amazon over the years. They were young parents who worked very hard raising their two kids and have just recently sent off them to college (success!)  After dedicating their time to being parents for much of their lives, it’s time to make big changes.  Rhianna quit her job to sell on eBay full time. Edgar is keeping his job with eye to one day join her. They moved into a smaller house to cut down on expenses. Maybe they’ll move to another state. Anything can happen. Now they can do anything you want. We love it. Freedom is having choices.

Hope you had a good week.

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This is probably one of our most anticipated conversations we’ve had with another seller. John (aka Spinach-eater) popped into our community a couple months ago and began discussing how he sells postcards on eBay. I guess for a lot of sellers, it’s a dream to only sell items that are easy to list, store, sell, and ship. With almost 15,000 postcards in his inventory, he has a serious system and does very well.

When I was talking to John about recording a conversation with us, I asked him why people buy old postcards. We talk about the success we have selling weird, unique vintage items because people are often buying “nostalgia”. They seek items you can’t buy on Amazon or at Walmart.  I loved his answer because it’s so important to know your customer:

I think everyone is a historian at heart. They want to see what their home town looked like 100 years ago. That old hotel on the corner is now a McDonalds. That old view is gone forever, except on the postcard. Or they always went to a certain beach/boardwalk as a kid and want to hold on to those memories. Most of my repeat buyers are collecting from just certain towns, or holidays. Very rarely will I get a buyer, buying multiple cards of different views. They don’t buy one of a ship, one of a town, and one of a holiday. They almost always but certain, specific categories. 

John was extremely generous sharing great detail about where he buys his postcards, how much he sells them for, how he ships them, and how he categorizes and stores them. He says he’ll keep an eye on the comments if you have any questions. Enjoy!

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Ryanne’s sister visited us this weekend from Boston, so we’re enjoying our town like tourists again. Swimming at the lake, watching a movie at the theater, grilling, hanging out with friends. Instead of our normal “what happened this week”, we’re posting a recent conversation we had with Deric, who’s a comedian and scavenger in upstate New York.

We’ve been trying to find someone who funds their art through their eBay store. Like an actor, filmmaker, dancer or writer. Instead of working for low pay in restaurant or temp jobs, we imagine that a struggling artist would make more money and have more flexibility scavenging and selling online. An actor could go on auditions anytime she wants and just work on his eBay store in her downtime.

Deric now has a wife and young daughter, so he’s taken on a full-time job and just sells on eBay in his spare time. But he still does stand-up comedy and we imagine together what his life would have been like if he sold on eBay in his early days of comedy. He described how he does a lot of scavenging in between comedy gigs when traveling. We also talk about how he presently juggles everything while running his store. And instead of working with his wife on eBay, they both run their own separate stores since they each have different specialties.

You can find Deric at these fine spots. he says he’ll answer any questions in the comments below.

• eBay store
• Facebook
•  And check out a 30-minute comedy set on Youtube that he did. Be warned that this video is NOT safe for work.

We had a much better sales this week. We’ll post our numbers in the comments. Hope things are good for you! Christmas is just five months away!

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Ryanne’s birthday was this weekend which is why we’re bringing you an interview with a Scavenger Supreme. 

We met Ben of VooDoo Vintage for the first time recently when we stayed in New Orleans. Even though we already knew some of his story from Wendy when she interviewed him three years ago, it was fun when Ben took us on a scavenger tour of New Orleans where we visited a number of estate sales. With a truck full of goods, we went back to his apartment and shipped stuff together (like true scavengers should!).

Ben makes a living through selling on eBay and a couple other streams of income (as a message therapist and landlord). He mainly scavenges at estates sales which seem plentiful in New Orleans. Ben also works alone which can be difficult since eBay requires an enormous attention to detail each and every day. In this conversation, Ben shares how he’s figured out how to work solo and be very efficient in his scavenging and selling.

In Ben, we found a kindred spirit since he also has been ruined to ever getting a full-time job. We talked about traveling, sleeping late, and real estate. As always, Ben will be answering any questions in the comments below. Hope you had a good week!

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This week we’re doing our yearly update with Mikey and Wendy. They were our inspiration to moving out to a rural community and finding ways to live outside the normal 9-5. We, in turn, turned them onto scavenging and eBay as a way to earn income.

They helped us start this podcast and you hear them on many of the early episodes. You can listen to our previous conversations with them over the past several years.

Mikey and Wendy still live in rural New Mexico, still sell on eBay, and have gotten involved in many new projects (like running regular ultra marathons). The process of evolving is the most fun part of this lifestyle. You can follow along with their adventures on their blog, The Good Life Lab.

Hope your week went well. Enjoy!

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For the past couple years, we’ve gotten requests to interview Nandry, the Teenage Thrifter. Thanks to Chris who did an introduction, we finally had the pleasure of talking with Nandry.

This interview is especially appropriate after our recent conversation with Jim Collins, who shared a lifetime of knowledge and experience about saving money, investing, and taking chances. Now we hear from a young woman who’s just starting out on her journey for independence in a very connected online world.

Nandry is 18 and is about to go off to college after just graduating from high school. She decided to be home schooled during her high school years. Instead of working at the local fast food joint after six period, she was running her own eBay business during the day. Not only was she plotting her own education, she was making her own money (and much more than minimum wage) and learning business skills that will only amplify and improve as she gets older. What awesome parents she must have.

Though we don’t plan to have kids, many sellers are knee deep in rug rats. We have lots of conversations in the comments about how to get young people into starting their own business. I’m not sure if Nandry can give you a definitive solution, but at least you can hear what motivates her.

Just ask Nandry any questions in the comments below. We’ll see if she can stop by to answer them.

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Hi from Bellingham, Washington! We’re about to head to Bend, Oregon where we’ll have a week to enjoy life before our next job. Are we scavenging? Of course we are.

In lieu of posting our usual weekly update on our scavenging and selling, we’re sharing an interview we did we Jim Collins of jlcollinsnh.com.  He’s one of the strong voices in the Early Retirement or FI (financial independence) community. This is where people save enough money where they no longer need to work to pay their bills because they can live on their investments. This is called the 4% rule. The point is to stop working, but have the ability to do your best work.

Jim interviewed us several months ago. When I originally tried to interview him several months ago, I felt I did a poor job. His experience and knowledge is so rich that I initially had trouble finding a clear path through his story. But Jim was kind enough to let me interview him a second time which turned out much better.

Jim’s readers will probably be familiar with his story and philosophy. He started saving and living frugal as a young man, which gave him freedom of choice is his work life. As his career progressed, he consistently saved and invested his money, which has given him the ability to comfortably retire. Unlike today, he didn’t have the benefit of online communities that are discussing and sharing different strategies to gain financial independence. This is the story of how Jim found his own way.

For Scavengers here, we wanted to share what we are striving for by finding junk and selling it online. The first goal is to simply work hard for ourselves, instead of working hard for someone else. No more going into the office and dealing with the unhealthy dynamics of the workplace. Instead we own our time and have reached a level of daily satisfaction in our life we never thought we could have.

But our ultimate goal isn’t to just sell things online for the rest of our lives.  By being super thrifty and saving our eBay earnings, we hope to continue to pay off our debts, aggressively build our rental business, and then follow the 4% rule to be able to more fully focus on the projects we enjoy doing.

This is what Financial Independence is all about. We’re a long way from early retirement, but as Jim makes clear in his story, it’s about committing to the vision and doing it a day at a time.

Here are some of the links Jim mentions in our conversation:
—His famous stock series
—What are index funds? and How do they work?
—What is a safe withdrawal rate on retirement funds?
—The 4% rule
—Why Debt is a burden
—A case study when everything goes wrong in your financial planning.
—Jim’s awesome video channeling John Goodman
—How Jim lost money in real estate
—How Jim’s “short attention span” pushed him to keep finding new jobs/challenges

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We all know that the bottleneck to running an eBay business is photographing and listing items. Treasure hunting, picking, thrifting, dumpster diving, scavenging: this is the fun, easy part. The often tedious work of listing each item on eBay is the part that throws most people off. There’s a long, dusty trail of burnt out sellers who have given up the ghost because listing got too much.

About a year ago, we did an interview with Susie who explained how she used a Virtual Assistant in the Philippines to help her list.  Sue had a very particular process that worked for her. Also, she was able to travel to the Philippines to help her train her assistants. Since they were “virtual”, they could only do so much of the work.

We also interviewed Will aka Terminal99 about how he has hired two full-time employees who help him photograph and list. He pays a full salary and benefits.

Today, we talk w/ Lisa & Dan from NewVintageNY. Both have full-time jobs, but have managed to build an eBay store with over 6000 items. They’ve created an eBay pipeline where they find the items, but then locally hire out the work of photographing and listing. By placing ads on Craigslist, they are finding trusted people willing to be paid per listing. It’s a cool conversation because they’re still figuring it out.

You’ll hear us walk through their process, what they’ve learned, and how they plan to expand. After we recorded this conversation, Dan has hired a new person to help list. Hopefully he’ll update us all in the comments.

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