Finance Gets Personal

I am sunburned, tired and sore. I’m also about $240 richer.

That’s right…we had a garage sale.

Given that my goal was to make at least $200, and that I declared I’d be pissed if I made less than $100, I’d say things went pretty well.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading garage sale tips from places like the Yard Sale Queen and Get Rich Slowly (click here and here). Here are some of the tips that I used, along with how well they worked for me:

Have a Group Sale - We held our sale during the annual neighborhood garage sale. This was probably the best thing we could do, because the homeowner’s association paid for advertising and had signs you could see from the highway. Best of all, there were two other garage sales within houses of ours, so you could park and hit three sales at once. We had a ton of traffic!

Advertise - I posted two ads in the garage sale section of Craigslist, and the people running the neighborhood sale posted one too. I’m not sure how much traffic came from Craigslist, but it did lead to our Playstation 2 getting sold first thing that morning because a lady had seen my ad on Craigslist and emailed me back with some questions. I’m also still getting an occasional email asking if we sold our microwave and video games. Since the homeowner’s association took out ads in local papers, we didn’t have to pay anything for advertising.

Play Music - I burned a CD of songs to play during the garage sale, but people started coming half an hour before the garage sale was supposed to start, and I didn’t even have time to go to the bathroom for three and a half hours, let alone get the CD out of my computer! So, the Spongebob CD player sat on the ground with no CD in it for half of the day. I could have sold that CD player at least 15 times, because everyone wanted to know how much it was. I do think people tended to linger longer once we turned the music on though.

Price Everything - While this took a lot of work, I think it saved us a lot of time answering questions. I had some clothes on hangers that we planned to make a rack for but didn’t have time, so they were just lying on a table. The clothes kept coming off the hangers though, so I was answering a lot of questions about these.

Have Some Free Stuff - Our most popular item was a basket full of stuff with a sign on it that said “Free!” I put burned CDs, coupons, magazines, McDonald’s toys and other stuff I didn’t think people would pay for in there, and almost everything was gone by the end of the day. People would sometimes ask, “Is this really free?” and I’ve never seen kids get so excited - “Look, mom - FREE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Sell Drinks - This was another one of our most popular items, mostly because it was 84 degrees outside. I purchased a 24-pack of bottled water for $3.98 and sold them for 25 cents each. I probably could have charged 50 cents, but we didn’t get the cooler outside until around noon, so they weren’t that cold. Still, we sold at least 20 of them.

Don’t Use a Cash Box - I think this is very important. We bought a bankers bag at Walmart, and I carried it around with me everywhere I went. When we started getting a lot of cash in the bag, I took all the twenties in the house. Things can get hectic, and you won’t be able to watch your money all the time. Unfortunately, my husband lost $20 out of his pocket during the garage sale. Someone found it on the ground and asked if it was ours, but he didn’t think it was at the time (realized it later when he counted his money). So, the woman then said she thought it was hers because she couldn’t find her keys - I don’t blame her, but you’ve got to be careful!

Place Your Best Items and “Manly” Items Near the Street - The items we placed closest to the street were the “Free” basket, a child’s art desk and chair and our electronics table (DVDs, CDs, video games). While this might have helped with traffic, my husband thinks a couple teenagers walked off with some video games. So you might want to keep your valuable items that can walk easily closer to where you’ll be sitting.

Organize Your Items into Groupings - For example, keep all the kitchen stuff on one table, all the home decor stuff on another, etc. This seemed to work fairly well. Actually, the way we laid out the sale made it so everyone saw all the items - we lined tables/items down each side of the driveway and in front of the garage, like an upside-down “U.” We tried to place adult items on higher tables, while a lot of the toys were placed on coffee and end tables that are on kid-level. In the afternoon, we went through and re-folded clothes, filled in blank spaces and put items back where they belonged.

Make It Easy for Shoppers to Test Electronic Items - The most frequently asked question of the day (besides, “Will you take a quarter for this?”) was, “Does this work?” Luckily, I had just bought a ton of batteries, so I got those out so people could test the items. We also have an outdoor plug-in by the garage. However, that wasn’t enough for some larger items. We ended up getting out some popcorn to show that the microwave worked, and hauling a TV down from our bedroom to demonstrate the Playstation 2. I also had to get out my stepson’s Nintendo DS to show that a game worked (although I struggled with figuring out how to turn the thing on and where the game goes!). We probably could have prepared better for this.

Price Your Items Slightly Higher to Account for Haggling - I did this for our larger items, but didn’t really think it would be an issue for items under $1. Boy, was I wrong! All day long, I was asked if I’d sell 50 cent items for 25 cents. I usually said OK. There were a few times when I didn’t accept a lower offer, and I ended up selling those items for full price later in the day.

Make Everything Half Price During the End of the Sale - Our garage sale was set for 8 a.m. - 4 p.m., but by 1:00, things were pretty much dead. At 2:00, I put out a big sign that everything was 50% off. This helped move a few things, but there weren’t any large purchases in the afternoon. If we do the sale again next year, I think we’d probably make more money if we were only open from 8 a.m.-12 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, instead of 8 a.m.-4 p.m. on Saturday.

Be Prepared the Night Before - We did OK with this, but at 2 a.m., there were still some items without prices. We got most of these priced in the morning, but still ended up not putting out some of our items until noon due to all the early birds. I realized later that we never even put out a bike we were going to sell. Bottom line - get started early in the week!

Get a Roll of Quarters, 25 Ones and a Few Fives Before the Sale - This was the guideline I used, but I ran out of fives fairly quickly. So I’d recommend getting at least $40 in fives. We also used the change from our change jar since we had a few items priced at 5-10 cents.

Don’t Diss Your Items - I didn’t really have much time to interact with the shoppers since I was so busy answering questions and taking money. I was honest, but positive, about all the items…with the exception of a talking Bob the Builder doll that I said I hated as I was putting it out on the table - it sold later that day for $2. Unfortunately, the Bob the Builder DVD didn’t sell.

Have Some Shopping Bags for People to Carry Their Items In - I had quite a few, but don’t usually save plastic bags. So I ran out fairly quickly and only had trash bags. Practically EVERYONE wanted a bag, so I’d recommend you start saving them a month or two in advance.

Keep Track of the Items You’ve Sold - IMPOSSIBLE! Of course, we only had two people, and my husband spent most of the time helping people test electronics, carrying items out to people’s cars and working on his laptop (”What? They want you to work from home during our garage sale?!?!”; “Excuse me, is that laptop for sale?”). I tried to keep track of how much my stepson sold for a while, but it was just not possible. We estimated that he made $35 from his toys and books, so that’s what we gave him (side note to stepson in case he ever reads this: sorry - I know you thought that number was exact, but it’s actually more than the $20 you were expecting - besides, who bought all that stuff?).

Put Any Items You Don’t Want to Sell Away - We tried our best, but still had multiple requests to purchase our CD player, my husband’s laptop (which he was working on), our TV (which was only out to test the PS2) and our coffee and end tables (which were displaying toys). Strangest request: We have an Irish beer poster that’s been folded up in our closet for a few years, and at the bottom it has a spot for the bar to write its weekly special or whatever. Well, I wrote “Garage Sale” and taped it to the garage door with painters tape. Within an hour, the sign had been purchased by an Irish guy for $2.

The Bottom Line:
I’m pretty pleased with our sale. Our best-selling items included DVDs, CDs, video games, kitchen items, jewelry, Yu-Gi-Oh/Baseball/Football cards, small toys, children’s books and the bottled water. Even after ordering pizza, buying signs/price stickers and paying my stepson for his items, we ended up with about $240 to use toward our new mattress. Although that night I decided we’d never have a garage sale again, I think it’s something I could handle once a year. I’m going to list a few of our more valuable items on Craigslist and take an expensive dress to the consignment store this week, then donate everything else to charity. Hey, I think I’m halfway done with organizing my basement now!

(This post was included in the Carnival of Personal Finance, hosted by Mrs. Micah.)

Photo Credit: Garage Sale by Lance McCord, used under Creative Commons licensing.

Tags: Garage Sale, Snowflaking