Money Infant

When I first began getting out of debt one of my priorities was to declutter by selling all my old stuff. You would be amazed how much money you can get together selling all the old stuff in your house, basement, garage and attic. I sold old ski’s, electronics, bikes, and of course books, movies and video games. I don’t remember exactly how much I made, but I do know it was thousands of dollars.

How can you use this information to make more money yourself? Glad you asked!

Let’s look at Amazon first. Amazon is actually one of the first websites I ever used to sell stuff. I never got into the whole eBay thing, but I did have a nice little side business selling used books on Amazon for a while some years ago. With the proliferation of eBooks and the addition of so many independent bookstores on Amazon I’m not sure how viable that would be these days. Plus, selling books on Amazon is somewhat tedious and time consuming. All the books need to be uploaded, you need to handle the shipping yourself, and you have to continuously replenish your stock.

Gazelle was quite a bit easier. They will pay you for used electronics, though I must say the prices weren’t as high as I would have liked. They will even buy broken iPhones. The downside is sourcing old electronics for sale. Used books were easy to find at yard sales, thrift shops, Goodwill, and a variety of other places. Not so much with electronics. Plus, there is no way to know how much you can get for the used electronics which means you could get burned if you aren’t up to date with Gazelles’ offering prices.

Bargains Galore!

MusicMagpie was also easy to use, and they pay for shipping so all you need to do is enter your barcodes into their website and they’ll let you know how much each cd, dvd, and game is worth. It gets even better though. If you wanted to pursue making more money with MusicMagpie they actually have an iPhone app that lets you use the iPhone camera to scan barcodes. This means you could go out actively looking for old movies, music and games, scan them to see how much they are worth, and then make sure you are paying less to acquire them! I’m pretty sure that if I was still in the U.S. I would take full advantage of this. I don’t have much in the way of physical movies, music and games, but we do have a handful of DVD’s for my daughter. Scanning them into MusicMagpie gave values between $2.10 and $5.72. Now I know I probably couldn’t get rich sourcing stuff and selling it this way, but I’ll bet I could make several hundred dollars a week.

Even if you want to use these services just to get rid of your own stuff I’ll bet you could easily make several hundred dollars (assuming you have a large collection of old cd’s, games and/or movies that is). I don’t know many people who don’t have a large collection of at least one of these types so it’s a bet I’m pretty sure I would win.

We will be back in the U.S. this summer for 3-4 weeks and I know my wife loves the whole yardsale, thrift shop, weekend market thing AND she loves making money in unconventional ways like this. So, there’s a good chance we will give this idea a try and I can update you on our results then.

What about you? What services have you used to sell your old stuff (or the old stuff of others) and make money? Enquiring minds want to know!