Gather Little by Little

We’ve decided to clean house, and I don’t mean dust and vacuum (although the glblgal did that too). As you may or may not know, we have 6 children, 5 boys and a girl. Our house while not small by any means has been getting a bit cramped lately with stuff. So earlier this week we decided to do a little shifting around and do a major clean-out of our stuff. Tricia’s book review of Debt is Slavery and in particular the following quote really lit the fire under me to really really clean house:

“Owning stuff not only costs money, it costs time and peace of mind. In addition to money, you spend time and energy storing stuff, cleaning it, maintaining it, fixing it, worrying about it, and moving it.” – Debt is Slavery: and 9 Other Things I Wish My Dad Had Taught Me About Money

The book even prompted Tricia to sell a number of her possessions in her garage sale as well. I was going through our house last night finding anything and everything I could. The Bible tells us not to “store our treasures here on earth“. Well, I’m all for that, and my wife was hiding the kids and dogs last night!

So we’ll be up early Saturday morning and hopefully sell everything we can. Whatever remains we will donate to Goodwill. I’ll keep you posted on earnings, to which 100% will go against our Chase card.

Here’s a few tips on having a successful garage sale:

1. Advertise in your local paper. Just a plain, cheap text ad is fine. Make sure you include your address, neighborhood name, start and end time, and highlight 5-10 of the items you’ll be selling. If you are doing the yard sale with your neighbors, make sure you highlight it is a “Multi-family” yard sale.
2. Put signs up the day before. A lot of serious yard sale people will drive around the night before to find where the sale will be, and even scope out your items as you are preparing. So get the signs up early.
3. Speaking of signs, direct people straight to your home. Put large, visible signs up at each intersection with arrows clearly showing people how to get to your home. Put balloons on your mailbox to clearly mark your home. One tip on signs, make sure the sign is readable. Remember, text that looks big a foot away when you are writing it is very small from 50-100 feet away when people are in a car. Make it bigger than you think it needs to be.
4. Advertise on Craigslist
5. Have change. A number of folks that come early in the morning will not have a great deal of change, so make sure they can purchase your items with larger bills and you can provide them with change. I typically run by the bank the day before and get a roll of nickels, dimes and quarters. I also get about 20 one dollar bills.
6. Have bags for people to carry their items off. We save our plastic grocery bags anyway, but if we know we’re having a yard sale soon, we’ll save even more. It’s just a nice courtesy that people appreciate, and a great way to recycle those plastic grocery bags.
7. Make sure items are clearly marked with a price. Use tape or other very sticky material. Unfortunately people will move/change the price tags.
8. Watch your goods. People will steal, so keep a close eye on your items. We generally position our older boys around the sale to serve as “security”. It keeps them busy and helps us out.
9. Sell drinks and snacks. This is something we let our younger kids handle and they get to keep the proceeds. It’s a great way to teach them the basics of sales and the sales business, along with providing your attendees with a nice cool drink and snack.
10. Tape matching clothing items together. This makes it easy for your attendees to tell what goes together, and keeps them from separating the items.

If you are looking for a way to get some supplemental income to pay off that debt and get rid of some extra stuff, a yard sale is an easy and fun way to do it.