3/24/13 Purchase Summary

Yesterday had the potential to be the best garage saling day I've had in years. Sadly, I had to quit before 9:00 but I still got some good deals.

We started at a multi-family sale that was actually multi-family and good. There were at least five houses participating and they all had a lot of stuff. At the first house I bought a stack of 22 textbooks. The seller initially wanted "one or two dollars each" but I offered $5 for all, knowing they were all copyright 2005 or later. I figured with that many books I could at least make my money back on Amazon and then sell the rest on Craigslist. She was initially hesitant about letting them go for only $5, but she accepted in the end and threw in a 23rd book that's a perfect Father's Day gift. I've already got $25 for two of the books with the Amazon buyback program. I have another book listed on Amazon for $22 and the rest are listed on Craigslist.

The second house had a DVD I got for a quarter, another father's day gift. Some other houses had stuff in which I was interested that were priced too high. Finally, the second to last house had a DS Lite marked at $20. The seller was really friendly so I offered $5 just to see if she'd take it. She actually considered but then countered with $15. We ended up settling at $8. The DS Lite is definitely an upgrade from the DS I bought a few weeks ago so the DS is going on Craigslist. The DS Lite works perfectly; the only problem is that it's pink.

Finally, I bought a Nerf gun for $0.25. I have it on Craigslist for $20 but I expect to get $10 for it in the end. By then it was almost 9:00 and I had to quit.

Later on in the day I was out for a walk and came across an unmarked sale. I ended up buying two GameCube games and an empty GameCube case from the unmarked sale for $1. I have the case listed at $12 on eBay but I don't really expect it to sell for that much.

Altogether, I spent $14.50 yesterday. That's definitely more than I usually spend but I've already made more than my money back and I have the potential to make significantly more with those textbooks.

Items to Avoid: Textbooks

Back in April, I wrote a two part post discussing how to choose textbooks for resale. I've been thinking about it recently and I've thought of a few red flags you should avoid when buying textbooks.

First of all, don't buy custom editions. They're easy enough to spot because they usually say "CUSTOM EDITION FOR X SCHOOL" on the cover. They don't hold resale value like non-school specific books because the market is too small. Rather than being able to sell to the entire country on Amazon, you're stuck selling to students at one particular school or, more likely, students taking one particular class at one particular school.

The most important rule is to research a book before you buy it. Even if the copyright date is only two years in the past, there's still a decent chance there's a new edition. Use your smart phone to make sure it's worth spending the money on a book. Remember, Amazon takes $2.34 plus 15% of the cover price and media mail typically comes to almost $4 (your full shipping credit) for medium to large textbooks. If I'm not sure a book is worth it, I won't buy it unless I can get eight for a dollar or equivalent.

The good thing about buying textbooks is that people don't know their books retain value. A lot of people seem to think that because their university bookstore won't buy the book back it's worthless. Capitalize on this. When I bought three textbooks last week, I worked the seller down by suggesting they were worthless to her. Very few people seem to know you can sell items on Amazon so use their ignorance to your advantage.

A Post in Which I Discuss my Disgust with Another's Written Work

I spent last night reading this book (How to Make a Fortune with Other People's Junk) in an attempt to familiarize myself with some other potential garage saling tip sources. This book in no way deserves the 4.1/5 stars it currently has on Amazon; I agree with user Lovelylisa's review in that the only positive reviews are from the author's family. This book is just bad. It's 200 pages of bad advice. It may be useful if you really want to get into antiques -- the author's specialty -- and know absolutely nothing about them. Even then it would only help if you had been dropped two or three dozen times on your head as a child. The tips in this book are either plain bad or so general as to be worthless.

I'm not going to bother with a full review because it's not worth my time or yours. I have instead created a list of some of the worst advice from the book:

• The author says you should go out even as it's raining as rain means there will be fewer people out saling. It also means there will be fewer sales; in my experience none at all.
• The author proposes this ridiculous method of finding sales that involves the classified section of the local newspaper(s), a map, and some other voodoo. She plots out all of the "good-sounding" sales within a 40 mile radius of her home and then uses the map to find a driving route between them. She doesn't have a set route and thus claims that driving "200 to 500 miles on a Saturday morning" is not out of the ordinary.
• She claims estate sales should be your most desired sales. That's true if all you want is antiques but for people who don't want overpriced furniture estate sales are at the bottom of the list. You rarely find anything besides overpriced housewares at estate sales.
• The author says that to find information about garage sales in a city you should "call the chamber of commerce." Because you know, the chamber of commerce is dedicated to organizing individuals' garage sales.
• She says you should drive by houses at night to find where they are so you don't get lost in the morning. I guess if you have the money to drive 400 miles just for garage saling you have the money to  go ahead and do it twice.
• The author actively discourages you from leaving your set route if you see signs for sales not advertised in the newspaper. I guess she's in such a hurry to get to her garage sales she can't stop at other garage sales.
• My biggest complaint about this book is the suggested bargaining technique. All you're supposed to do is ask "is that your best price." Nothing says "I'm an amateur" more than that phrase. 

There's a bunch more garbage in this book that I'm not even going to cover. She did stumble on some good ideas by accident in a few places:

• Haggle on everything. It saves you money and gives you practice.
• Mention flaws in an item to bring the price down.
• Size up a seller before you bargain to try to determine what bargaining techniques will work on him or her.
• Bundle (or "group" as the author calls it) items for extra discounts.
• Play dumb and ask questions about an item to both bring the price down and not let the seller know you're in the resale market.
• If you see an item you want, grab it before someone else and carry it with you.

This book is definitely geared more for people wanting to get into antiques and sell professionally in consignment shops and auctions. I was hoping for some good tips regarding resource guides (like pricing guides, etc) and reselling but the information was so general it's useless. I'm glad I didn't pay money for this book.

I think I'm going to keep looking for an actual good guide to garage saling but I don't have much help. I think all of the written guides are written by and for the dumb people who actually think they can consistently make enough money to be rich.