I have always loved garage sales. During several months a year (garage sale season), for decades now, driving around scouring through other people’s “stuff” on the weekends has been a ritual. Finding cool stuff, for next to nothing can be exhilarating! I always looked for things in which I was interested, things that were needed for the house, or nice clothes for the kids. Then, along came the internet and eventually in the mid-90s, a start-up site called eBay was gaining attention. Little did I know it would someday help change my life.
I finally got a home computer in the late 90s and signed up for eBay in 1999 to “bid” on items that otherwise may not be available to me. After purchasing a few items at really great prices, I thought that maybe I should get into the selling game. I started looking at garage sales for things not only to keep, but to resell. My first real find was a Queensryche Operation Mind Crime CD Box Set I purchased for two dollars at a sale. In the early days of eBay, there was not a lot of competition and if you had something unique, limited edition, or out of print/production, you were sure to sell it for a good price. I learned how to list my item, and waited for the bids to roll in. And boy did they! A bidding battle ensued and I sold that box set for around $50 to someone across the country. Back then, you waited for the check or money order to be mailed to you, and then for it to clear before shipping the merchandise. Check arrived, cleared, done deal. Wow! Easy money. I was hooked.
Over the next 15 years, I sold a few things I found, but life got in the way of my budding entrepreneurship. Flash forward to 2016, Kristi and I were garage saling, looking for cool stuff, or items for the house, when we came across two giant tubs of Magic the Gathering cards. Now, I had heard of these, but knew nothing about the game or the collectible cards themselves. Something in the back of my mind told me they could be worth something, maybe at a local card shop, or perhaps on eBay. Turns out the lady having the sale was DONE with her husband’s gaming addiction and wanted those things GONE. She wanted $20 per tub, which was a little more than I wanted to pay for an unknown-to-me commodity. So, I offered $30 and she wanted them gone so badly she took it, AND produced a third tub! There were thousands of cards and we immediately took them to a shop. The guy briefly sorted sorted through them and offered $150! Holy smokes, we could turn $30 into $150 in less than an hour, nice return! BUT, again, something in his demeanor told me that maybe we should look at these cards a little closer. We passed on the offer and took them home. Kristi and I spent the entire weekend sorting through those cards, organizing them and looking them up online. We learned which ones were rare and more valuable. To our surprise, it appeared we were sitting on a gold mine. I think the shop owner knew it, but chose to lowball us…his loss. It was time to shake the rust off the eBay skills. We spent the next couple of weeks continuing to learn, list, and sell those cards to the tune, when all said and done, of around $3000. Of course, this only served to whet our renewed appetite.
Our brains went to work on what else we may have around the house that could be worth selling. Kristi worked in Apple Computer Education in the late 80s-early 90s and she has always held on to “stuff”. As expected, she started unearthing multiple vintage Apple products from mugs, to bumper stickers, pens, notebooks, lunchboxes, and other items. They all sold for unbelievable prices in short order. She them remembered an HR Puff’n Stuff coffee mug she had been toting around over 20 years just sitting in the back of our cabinet. Turns out it was rare and highly collectable. It sold for $240! We found more stuff around the house, but knew we had to ramp up our search efforts at garage sales and eventually to thrift stores & online marketplaces.
The process and mechanics of reselling online is not hard, but it IS hard work. It can be VERY easy money, but you do have to put in the EFFORT and stick to it. After our initial success, we saw that this could be a nice side gig to help us pay off debt. We would spend time in the evenings after working our regular jobs and on weekends sourcing, researching, and listing, eventually spending, on average, approximately 30 hours a week (15 hrs each) on eBay related work. We set goals early on for numbers of listings we wanted to reach starting with 100, then 500, to now over 1000. With more listings usually comes more sales, which requires more sourcing to keep up with those numbers. Our sales steadily increased through 2019 to the point we actually had to consider this a legit business, which meant tax implications, record keeping, accounting, and inventory spreadsheets. The thrill of the hunt and the search for what in this business is considered a “home run” (buying something for very little and selling for a huge profit), as well as our accelerated debt pay-off, kept our drive alive.
In 2020 the world changed with the arrival of Covid. Interestingly enough, our eBay sales continued to grow. While we were largely restricted from sourcing new items with all the shutdowns, we continued to list items that we had sitting around and hadn’t yet addressed. Also, people being locked down at home drove them to online services and sales. Many categories had a huge surge in sales, like video games & collectables, which saw prices skyrocket. We dedicated part of our garage and an entire bedroom to our inventory. We also used much of our sunroom for staging and listing. As our debt diminished, it became real that we may be able to retire much earlier than we had hoped. You can see our other posts to learn how we began to make our dream a reality as we accelerated debt payoff and started downsizing, including our eBay business. We eventually sold everything, including our home, and moved into our fifth wheel RV. We also have access to a 16’x20’ outbuilding from which we conduct our business. After we became debt free, we chose to leave our W-2 jobs, but have chosen to continue our side business. Our new found time freedom has allowed us to spend as much or little time as we choose on eBay. If we decide to travel, we simply put the online store on hold. We plan to dissolve it completely at some point as we transition to full time travel, but have also considered continuing our sales from the road, albeit with an extremely scaled down model. We’ll see what the future holds! Bottom line, our time is ours to do with what we please!
There can also be many pitfalls in this type of business, which I will share in a future post. There are also many tips I’ve learned the hard way over the years that I can share, which will also be forthcoming. While this type of earning may not be for everyone, it can be fun, exciting, and quite profitable. The first step, of course, is action. Try looking around your house for unique, trending, nostalgic, or desirable items, do a little research, and list them online. There are many platforms these days. All of which can be successful if done right. If you need a little motivation, you can check out our eBay store page to see our listings at LakesideLoot. https://www.ebay.com/str/lakesideloot
Good luck!
We are Mike and Kristi, and we spent the last decade getting out of debt, saving money, and becoming financially independent so we could retire early and travel the globe. You can also follow our journey on Instagram at MKAlmostThere https://www.instagram.com/mkalmostthere/ and eventually on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCh6VD3QdcfN_2IIHkjk7V-Q.
Mike
9/24/2022
WOW Mike, this is very well written. So Glad you were able find a good 16’x20′ “Outbuilding”! WTG