T-Minus 335 Days: Purging and Selling Update

With the weekend's yard sale, I am ready to provide an update. Our goal is to sell enough stuff to pay for the move to Florida so we don't have to use our savings. 

The cost to move to Florida is anywhere between $10K and $20K. We have settled on a goal of $12K for our move. That means we have to use yard sales, Craig's List, Facebook Marketplace, and whatever we can to sell our stuff and raise the money.

We are just about 25% of the way there!

The majority of our sales income is coming from Facebook Marketplace.

I posted 224 items on Marketplace and Craig's list (I post them in both at the same time). The majority of our items have sold on Marketplace. Just 21% of the items I have posted are still for sale.

It is clear to me that Facebook Marketplace is where I should spend most of my effort.

My approach is to post items online at a good price. If the item doesn't sell within a day or two, it is unlikely to sell. After two weeks at that price, I drop the price by 10% and renew the listing so it appears at the top of the Marketplace list again. After the initial two week wait, I switch to waiting 7 days - then drop the price and renew. Marketplace lets you renew the listing 5 or 6 times. 

When I run out of renews, the product has been online for nearly two months! Anyone who wanted to buy it would have. I pull the product and put it in the next rummage sale for liquidation. If I think it is a really good product? I'll set it aside to be tried again in a few months.

This is the strategy I am using and so far it has worked pretty good for Marketplace. It isn't working for Craig's List and I'm not sure why. Perhaps people in my region don't use Craig's List very much. Or, perhaps I'm just doing Craig's list all wrong. 

That is the purging and selling update!

T-Minus 336 Days: Is a Yard Sale Worth It?

We survived the 3 day yard sale. Our immediate goal was to make more than the 2013 Yard a sale ($63). Our real small goal was $500, and our big goal was $1000. How did we do? Total was  $835. My mother's antiques sold $219, my sons sold $25, $90 was Market Place sales during the yard sale, and the rest was our sales. Bottom line? We inched across our small goal. But that is $500 that gets added to our move budget!

 A yard sale is an enormous amount of work. We spent weeks getting ready for the sale: purging and cleaning and organizing. In the days leading up we cleaned out the garage, sorted, and priced everything. Then, every day of the sale we got up at 6am to set up the yard sale. Every evening by 6pm we boxed everything back up and put it in the garage. Was it worth it?

We spend our lives collecting crap that we think has value but it really doesn’t. It is just crap. While my neighbors were in the pool, going on walks, and headed to the lake - we were shoveling shit for quarters. We were converting quarters into nickels as new and nearly new things were practically (and often actually) given away.

We read a smart magazine that told us to price hard cover books for $1, soft cover for $.50, and magazines for $.25. We had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of children’s books from every school book fair and book store and Christmas and everywhere imaginable. We priced them as per the recommendation but kept lowering the price during the sale until we were giving away books with every purchase. “Your purchase qualifies you to pick any five books for free!” We just wanted to get rid of them!

We had a large area for “free stuff” and we kept adding to the pile as the stark reality hit us: no one wants our shit. We couldn’t even give away most of the free stuff!

By the end, our prized and cherished baby clothes that were priced at $1 were selling for 2/$.25, then take 50% off.  Sometime we just rounded off the prices resulting in the clothes being free.

Bottom line: Nobody wants your shit! It isn’t worth the time and effort to get the stuff to those that might. It might be easier to just get a dumpster and throw it all away!

Once upon a time in New York State we could donate stuff for a tax write-off. That changed a few years ago and because NY is so highly taxed, you can’t get the write-off anymore - it is better to take the standard deduction. We used to donate things by the van load and it worked out great for everyone. Not anymore!

Online activity made the largest positive impact. I advertised on Craig’s list and Marketplace. People were continually sending me questions and asking if I would set aside items for them. Next, I took some of the items we were selling and I advertised them in market place to help with the sales. It made everything very busy: there was a constant flow of customers online and in the yard.

Sunday night came and we were done. We put many of our treasures out by the road for the garbage collectors. The remaining 30 totes were dragged into the garage and left for another day to sort and pack. 

Would I do a yard sale again? I am making more money on Market Place, but I am selling fewer things. The yard sale was good at getting rid of stuff, but it wasn't a very good money maker - not for all the effort that went into it. 

We are thinking about another yard sale, perhaps in August. We need to keep going through the house and purging and getting rid of things. I don't think the August sale will be as large, but it will help us to empty out many of the things we want to get rid of. And it will help us to inch closer to building our Florida move budget.

T-Minus 341 days: The Rummage Sale

We are getting ready for the great July 2020 Rummage sale! The last time we had a rummage sale (7 years ago?) we made $65. We are hoping to surpass that number by a lot.

We have spent the last several months purging and trying to sell stuff on Marketplace. Now we are ready to pour our treasures onto the front lawn for everyone to grab up. Dozens upon dozens of totes from Tub City were carried from the basement to the garage in preparation. Unfortunately, we aren't touching much of the rest of the house - which is concerning. But... we have to start somewhere!

Our sales on MarketPlace have blown past the $2000 mark! We have sold over 100 items and I have a lot more to sell. Add my mother's Antique Co-Op sales and we are approaching $2500.

I found out that dumbbells are HOT on Marketplace. I posted some for $1 per pound and they sold in 5 minutes. Before my cancer, I was curling the 50 pounders in 3 sets of 12, but those days are gone. Nevertheless, I had to prove my vitality by putting in a few curls before selling them - I still have it!

The garage is cleaned up. The tables are set up and cleaned. Next we load up the tables with merchandise so we can carry them onto the lawn in the morning. We'll put everything that doesn't fit on these tables outside in the morning (we have many more tables than will all fit in the garage). At 8am I hope to be taking the money hand over fist!

Every dollar gets us a dollar closer to that $12,000 Florida Move budget.

T-Minus 349 Days: Andrew Finney

Andrew Finney is a agent in central Florida who does YouTube videos. I have really enjoyed watching his videos about new construction in Florida. In this video, he talks about which upgrades are best.

T-Minus 350 Days: COVID really sucks (Part 2)

Our plan is to house shop in Florida in August. But.... Florida extended its quarantine for New Yorkers. If we went to Florida, we would have to remain quarantined for two weeks. Which... that isn't so bad. Being quarantined in Florida? I'll take it! But then... when we returned we would have to be quarantined in New York for two weeks. If we violate the New York quarantine? It is a $10,000 fine.

No trip to Florida in August! Instead, we are going to plan a week of virtually visiting neighborhoods, looking at houses, and talking with home builders.

In the meanwhile, we are purging the house as fast as we can. We have crossed the $1500 mark in online sales, and we have a huge yard sale planned for the 24th.

Previously we purged an eight foot area along one side of the garage. That was an enormous amount of work that took almost all day! Last weekend, we decided to go after the rest of that wall. The stuff is just piled 3 feet deep and six feet high, but we did it! We put many items out by the road for free, four lawn mowers at the street for sale, two tires, and a bunch of other things. With one wall completely done, there is only two more walls left to do!

Getting ready for a yard sale is another huge effort. It is funny how we spend our lives accumulating things we don't need so we can spend our lives trying to get rid of it. We take piles of this crap and move it here and there and accomplish nothing. We are marking things for fifty cents or a dollar hoping that all this hard work and effort pays off somehow. But it will never pay us back for all the effort we are putting into it.

According to our master plan, we were supposed to have picked a real estate agent for our New York Home and had a tour done so they could tell us what to fix. Due to the Pandemic, we have put that off. Instead, we have a four page list of work that we have identified that needs to get done. And I don't know when I am going to find the time to do all of this: re-caulk the bathroom sink, paint the living room ceiling, replace the kitchen faucet, change the molding around the side garage door, and the list just goes on and on. One of my biggest concerns? I finished the basement and turned it into store rooms, wood shop, a gym, man cave, and other rooms. But none of that work has ever been inspected! And I'm sure I didn't do everything correctly. Because none of it is inspected, I won't be able to include it as a selling point for the house, and a future buyer could demand it all be ripped out. Add to the list: find a contractor who can tell me what I need to fix in order to get it to pass an inspection.

If we weren't moving in 350 days, I'm not sure how I would be spending all my free time. Right now, every free moment is consumed and busy!

T-Minus 355 Day: COVID Sucks

I am slowly accepting that we won't be taking a trip to Florida in August to look at houses. According to New York laws, when we return from Florida we would have to isolate ourselves into one room of the house for two weeks. People would have to bring us everything we need - we wouldn't be allowed to leave. If anyone in the house came down with COVID during those two weeks, we could face a $10,000 fine for not properly isolating. $10,000 would erase most of our move budget!

As a result, we are thinking about "Plan B". Perhaps we could still set aside that week and visit neighborhoods using Google Earth. We could take virtual house tours using Zillow. And we could talk with builders and real estate agents over the phone instead of in person. Maybe our agent would give us a video tour of something we really wanted to see?

To me, this "Plan B" sounds like a bunch of BS. First, unless we leave the house - our normal routines will absorb our days and nothing will get done. However, if I use my vacation time from work to leave the house (go to a hotel or spend the day in a coffee shop) then I won't have that vacation time for a possible trip to Florida in the fall. Also, think of all the planning that would have to go into a remote house hunt in order for it to be successful. It is just BS!

Many things with Corona are BS. Weddings are getting rescheduled because there can only be 50 people attending the reception. The DMV opened last month, but they aren't doing permit tests, so, I can't get my youngest son a drivers permit! My oldest son needs his driver's license, and I can't get that either.

I said to my wife "If we can't go to Florida, how about we go to Myrtle Beach" and she said "same quarantine laws exist for South Carolina".

How are we supposed to make a decision about where to move to Florida if we can't go there? This is frustrating beyond belief.