Right now, we’re undergoing a junk purging at our house. It’s kind of liberating, in a way, seeing piles of stuff you no longer use or want going out of the house. I had a bit of a dilemma with it recently though. What do I do with all that crap?
To date, whenever we do this sort of thing, we’ve generally separated things into two piles – good enough to give to Goodwill and trash. Embarrassingly often, the ‘perfectly good enough to give to Goodwill’ pile is bigger by an order of magnitude. However, as I was getting rid of a batch today, I realized some of this stuff might actually be worth something.
The stuff in question was toys, specifically, ‘collectible’ dolls. I wondered, “would it be worthwhile to try to sell any of this stuff on Craigslist and/or Ebay?” I fired up the ol’ interweb and hit Ebay to find out. Turns out that, yes, some of this stuff was being sold and for half-decent coin.
Now I had a problem. I could either separate stuff into three piles – Goodwill, Ebay, trash, or I could continue with my two-pile system. Guesses what I did?
I stuck with two categories – Goodwill and trash.
Why? Simple – I did a quick calculation of how much time I’d spend selling the stuff compared to how much I’d make. There was no contest; it’s not worth it to me to take the time to sell it. I’ve never sold anything on Ebay, but I figured these would be the steps:
- Separate all this stuff.
- Take pictures of everything I wanted to sell.
- Create a listing with words and everything (me not so good with words).
- Start auction.
- Wait.
- Wait.
- Wait.
- Deal with person who won the auction (transaction, emails back and forth, etc).
- Go to post office, box and mail stuff.
- Repeat.
No thanks. I think I’ll just stick with giving it to Goodwill and taking a small tax deduction.
There’s probably a business in there somewhere. I give you my piles of possibly-salable crap, you sell it and keep a piece for yourself. Everybody wins I guess. There are probably people who do this already, though. I’m not a very creative person, so this idea’s probably being done.