Ways to Make Money – It’s Working!
Our main focus right now is finding ways to make money to help with debt reduction. We are learning ways to make money online as well, but the quickest way to get some fast cash right away was to start selling off things around the house (most of which was just collecting dust anyway).
Here’s an update on our progress:
- Selling Used Books, Videos & Music on Amazon.com
- Days selling: 27
- Items sold: 146 (avg 5.41 per day)
- Avg profit: $3.69
- Total Amazon profit** to date: $538.80
- Selling Household Items on Craigslist.com
- Selling on Ebay
This has worked out very well for us. We collected all the books, DVDs, CDs and games we had around the house and put them all up on Amazon. Check out our settlement report from Amazon for our first month selling:
Some additional stats:
**Profit number is sale price less selling fees, postage & supplies
We would have made a lot less money per item if we sold them at a garage sale, so I think this is definitely the way to go despite the additional work of listing, packaging and mailing. We still have a bunch of items listed and waiting to be purchased, PLUS we still have tons of stuff at home to list. So this has a lot of ongoing potential for us.
We’ve only sold 4 items so far (weight bench set, punching bag set, set of 2 garden benches and a dress form), but we have lots of other things to list. We just need to get them out, dusted off and a picture taken.
This method is even easier than Amazon, but I think it’s really best for larger household type items that are hard to ship. I doubt we’d do as well with the books & videos on Craigslist. Craigslist is totally free, and we just put in the ad that the buyer needs to pick up the item, so there are no fees or supplies to subtract. This one is pure profit.
Total Craigslist profit to date: $531.00
This is the time-honored way to make money online, but my feeling is that Ebay just isn’t the powerhouse it once was. When I moved from California to Texas, I sold a lot of stuff on Ebay and had some great success. But as I look up items now it seems there there is not much bidding going on and very few completed sales of similar items to use for comparisons. I think Ebay has really become more of an online merchant conglomeration rather than the global garage sale it used to be.
Nevertheless, it is the still only good place to sell some things that don’t work well on Amazon or Craigslist. We’ve only sold a couple of things there so far (back issues of expensive magazines). We do have quite a few things that will end up here, though (Bill’s old comic books, for instance), so we’ll see what happens.
Total Ebay profit to date: $10.30.
So in our first month, we managed to find ways to make money that earned us an additional $1,080.10! This helped us keep current on our bills but more importantly, allowed us to pay off debts (2) that were just sitting out there collecting interest every month!
What will next month bring?
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Have you ever wished you could just quit your job, move somewhere far away and start all over?We did, so WE ARE! We woke up and realized we were in our 40's, struggling from paycheck to paycheck, not loving where we live - not really living. So we decided to change it all.
Hmm in regards to your “profit” on Amazon you should also exclude the price you paid for the items that you sold..
Blogging Banks´s last blog ..$50 TradeKing Bonus
That would be true if I remembered how much I originally paid. But all of the stuff we are selling is stuff we’ve had sitting around the house collecting dust for ages. So, although there was a cost at some point, it is lost in time.
Great job and result on the first month.
Keep up the good job. Good luck!
Here is a great Microsoft Excel sheet that helps Amazon sellers price their products including Amazon’s Fees for their Marketplace – It basically is a fee calculator in reverse, take your cost and margin dollars or percentage and it will calculate the lowest price to sell at without losing money – simple to use – did I mention it was free. Plus a few other cool tools that you can use, like a Paypal Calculator.