Treasure Hunting

This weekend was an ideal time for finding some really nice things at garage sales. Garage sales are very popular means for raising a  little extra cash from items you have around the home that you just don’t use, or can easily part with. Living in Florida, going to garage sales can be a great year-round activity for the entire family. You really never know what treasures you might find at any given garage sale.

For the past two weekends in our area, we’ve been inundated by heavy rains and cold weather. This weekend’s weather was shaping up to be more of the same, but we got lucky and the latest stormfront blew out just in time for early morning weekend bargain hunting. It was a cool but sunny windy day, and with so few garage sales for the previous two weekends, there was an explosion of garage sales in just about every neighborhood we drove to.

We had a budget of $60 to spend, and we wound up spending $57. Here is a list of the items we found:

1. A Professional Kitchenaid Mixer still in the box (retails normally for $300)
2. Two huge boxes of collectible LEGOS (people go nuts for legos on ebay)
3. NIB (New in Box) pair of Easy Spirit Sandals (mens, size 11)
4. New duffel bag filled with a flag football set (multiple footballs, cones, flag belts, flags, whistles, etc.)
5. New pair of Addidas soccer cleats
6. Two Cell phones (see below for the reason why we bought these)
7. One NIB Ship in a Bottle inside wooden case
8. One designer purse with matching wallet
9. Brand new set of five 4″ three ring binders
10. One small fancy notebook

When we go to garage sales, we’re not only looking for items we can use around the house, we look for items we can flip on ebay for a profit. You can pick up all sorts of items at garage sales that will sell well on ebay if you know what you’re looking for. There are literally thousands of things you can find that you an re-sell for a profit. All you need to do is to go find them and do a little research on ebay. Our articles on ebay research at the top of our website will help you get started.

If you’d like to see some of our auctions in action, check us out on ebay here: http://myworld.ebay.com/mr.peanut904/

Now, you may have asked yourself, “Why in the world are these people buying old used cell phones?” It’s true that reselling old cell phones is very difficult to do on ebay, and with so many cellular companies locking their moble phones so that you can’t easily transfer them from one person to another, there really isn’t a whole lot of incentive out there to do anything with old cell phones. So, many of the ones we find are a real bargain. We rarely pay more than a quarter for them whether they’re working or not.

So what are they good for? I’ll tell you. There’s a great cell phone recycling program over at swagbucks.com. Swagbucks offers it’s users virtual dollars that they can trade in on prizes, gift cards and real tangeable items like video game systems and other products for using their services. You can earn digital swag dollars for just using their search engine frontend to search the web, or do fun things like send them old cell phones for free swagbucks. They’ll even pay you the postage. If you’d like to learn more about swagbucks, click below!