Just before we moved houses we decided to have a garage sale and made $408. That sounds pretty good but when I broke it down I don’t think it was worth all the time and effort.
Decisions
Garage sales are hard work. The hard work isn’t so much the actual physical effort thats required its more the decisions you have to make when going through all the junk sentimental items.
“This needs to get thrown in the garage sale pile”
“Wait, really ? I’ll lose that 10kg’s after about a month of training so why throw them out ? We’ll just have to buy another pair of jeans. Whats the point in that ? Aren’t we trying to SAVE money ?”
“Seriously ? You was supposed to start training 6 months ago !”
“Yeah well I’m going to give it another shot. Just wait and see”
“I’ve been waiting for 3 years now !!”
ARRRRGGGGHHH !!
And thats just for one pair of jeans. Now apply that same type of conversation to books you’ve been meaning to read, furniture you’ve been meaning to ‘restore’, and toys you were going to fix for your kids and its enough to drive you INSANE !
The Breakdown
So here’s how it went down.
- Two days sorting out everything. If I were doing it alone it would have taken 2 hours. The amount of ‘discussions’ I had with my wife was enough to keep me from ever wanting to do another garage sale.
- One afternoon setting up the sale. We got some family in to help us put up gazebos, set up drink stalls, and make everything on sale look presentable.
- One day selling and cleaning up.
We were so over the whole process at the end that we decided to ‘donate’ the unsold items to tip. Endeavour Foundation has a container at tip we go to so we were able to put 70% of the unsold items in that container.
Funny thing is that $320 or almost 80% of the money we made came from three items.
- An iPad Mini that no one used.
- A brand new TV Wall Bracket that was meant to be mounted.
- A brand new Blu Ray player that we got free when we bought our TV.
Without those 3 items we would have made a whopping $88…actually we would have made $38 since we spent $50 on lunch/drinks for all the helpers, placing an ad in the paper and our free drinks (cordial or cold water) for the people who came to the garage sale.
The Verdict
What we were better off doing was just donating the lot to charity (except our three main money earners) and selling the iPad Mini, wall bracket and blu ray player separately on Gumtree. If you’re really eager, you can even get a tax deduction on your donation and someone else can also benefits from it.
You also don’t have to set up an actual garage sale. As well as that you don’t have to deal with people tuning up early in the morning while its still dark like we had to. I wondered how this guy was going be able to properly look at whats on offer and then he reached into his backpack and pulls out a flashlight !
In the end our move to our new place was much easier. No need to make decisions about whether something needed to stay or go and getting people in that live and breathe removals takes so much stress away from the situation.
Always get in the professionals when you move. This is what they do everyday and they will make your life a whole lot easier.
