I bet you ignore garage sales. Many of people do. Afterall, a garage sale is just an excuse to unload some junk and have a chat with the neighbors, isn’t it? No, garage sales have become much more than that. Savvy buyers can discover some real treasures at these sales that are worth far more than you pay for them. Work-at-home-moms can easily purchase enough items to sell from a weekly trip to garage sales to make a nice extra income.
The key to finding the best items at garage sales is to get out early. There may be heaps of garage sales on any typical Saturday in your town. If you arrive just as the homeowners start selling, you will get the choicest pick of the items before everybody else arrives. The biggest untruth about garage sales is that all the items for sale is just junk. Well, it is sort of true – if you arrive later in the day you will find that all the best items have already been snatched up, and only the junk remains.
For work-at-home-moms to acquire an extra income from garage sale items, you must arrive at the sales as they open, have enough purchasing cash to take with you, and a large size vehicle to transport the larger items. The most valuable items to you will cost you more than the usual one dollar that most buyers favor.
When buying to resell the most profitable items includes furniture, vintage bicycles, watches, electrical appliances, and tarnished silver items. But of course, many other items will prove profitable too. As you gain more experience at buying and selling, the range of items you are willing to purchase will increase too.
I mentioned above to look out for tarnished silver, because this is where you can gain some serious profit. You see, silver items that are not cleaned regularly often turn a grubby brown color. To the unknowing these items just look like a useless bit of metal junk. But clean it up and it could turn out to be a piece of valuable antique silver and worth a great deal.
Whatever you buy to resell, aim to only purchase stuff that has degraded cosmetically. This way you just have to clean the items up to a reasonable standard before you resell them. Of course, you will have to use your best judgement if an item needs more than just a clean up. In such a case it is important that the item is complete and that you are confident that you can repair it to a satisfactory standard.
Oh, and don’t buy any electrical appliance until you have plugged it in and checked that it works.
The extra income you make is only limited by how much you can store and the time taken to fix them up for resale. You can probablyuse your garage or shed to store and repair stuff. But it is essential that you have a period of time in mind for each item to be resold, otherwise you will soon run out of storage space. You do not want to get into a state of affairs where you are selling things on just to free up storage space for more items – that is a guaranteed way to minimize your profit (if any).
It won’t be long before you develop a knack of finding valuable stuff and find that you are buying more and more stuff. That’s when you will have outgrown storing items in your garage and will need to consider renting a storage facility. This is an excellent time because the more that you buy and sell, the more your extra income grows. An additional storage facility will give you more flexibility, and the extra outlay is a legitimate deductible business expense.
You will use three main outlets for selling your items. Antique and furniture stores always have a need for good quality stuff. After a while you will get many of these kinds of stores as repeat customers if the quality of your stuff is good. Ebay and Craigslist will be your other outlets, and are especially suitable if you don’t like being face-to-face with customers.
This is an ideal business for work-at-home moms. You can easily fit it into your schedule, you can increase the bond with your kids by getting them involved in helping you, and the extra income you earn is a great incentive to expand your business.
