Welcome to Limbo Week. That’s the week after camp ends, just before school begins. It’s difficult to get work done, but we’ve been learning about dinosaurs (thanks Dino Dana) and math (Cyberchase – both streaming free if you have Amazon Prime.) I also picked up some very basic Disney workbooks from DollarTree: first reading, addition/subtraction, and time/money. It’s amazing what a dollar can buy you these days!
Limbo Week is so crazy that I’m introducing it on a Wednesday! I’m going to do things a little differently today and go with a shorter article. Like Zombo Com, I can do anything during Limbo Week.
This past weekend, I found out how easy hosting a yard sale can really be. And by “I”, I mean my wife. That’s tip #1 to hosting an easy yard sale: Pass it off to your spouse… and hope he/she doesn’t read your blog that day. It wasn’t like I was just eating Bonbons on the couch, I was watching the kids and dog sitting… while eating Bonbons on the couch.
The yard sale hosting tip I wanted to share was renting a table at a community sale. One of the reasons why we don’t have a yard sale is that we’d have to create signs, advertise in Craigslist, and all that stuff to bring the traffic to us. All that just to waste 5 hours in the morning with people talking you down from 50 cents to 15 cents on everything. I have a friend who just donates everything to Goodwill and takes a tax write-off.
My wife found a community yard sale at a local church. The table fee was $30, which might be a tax deductible donation (check with your tax advisor). I figured that even if we didn’t sell anything, we’d still be helping out a charity. My wife brought a bunch of baby clothes and baby toys that we could no longer use. She ended up selling over $100 worth, to make a profit of $70. At the end of the yard sale it still looked to me like we had as much as she started with, but she assured me that it was much, much less. I suppose it would have to be because making $70 at 50 cents and a $1 here and there is a lot of selling.
Making $70-$75 isn’t exactly going to change our lives. However, the idea that someone else can reuse the products to help the environment and clear some of the garage/basement is big. It feels like a triple win for us and I’m sure the buyers feel the same way.
While on the topic of buyers, I love saving money by buying stuff at yard sales. We built a room from yard sale stuff.
I brought the kids to this yard sale for a little bit and ended up finding a very basic checkers game for $1, this Spin and Store food storage set for $2, and this Brain Quest America game for $2.
There’s another church sale in October. If the schedule lines up, we’ll be back with a lot more to sell.
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Thanks for the article. We used to have a yearly garage sale with some friends and made a decent amount of money(subtracting the donut and pizza charges of course). Over time we’ve moved to just giving stuff away. There are close donation centers for Big Brother Big Sister and Goodwill. I do understand the controversy that some places throw away cloths that they don’t like. We also use Freecycle and Nextdoor to list items for give away and have had good luck. What works best for some things is putting it on the curb for the trash a little early. We have scavengers that come through and will take almost anything.
My wife and I love yard sales as well. Probably 50%+ of our stuff is from them. They are a great way to save money and get some really neat gear. When we do a yard sale, it is a family affair. I wish I could just hand it over to my wife, but she won’t let me get away with that :-).