On Friday, on the spur of the moment, my wife decided to fill our minivan full of things we don’t need and take them the next morning to the parking lot of a local church that was renting tables at their church yard sale. We paid $40 for the use of 2 tables, which we filled with our used children’s books, kitchen gadgets, dishes, holiday decorations, and a variety of other items. Our rule was that we were only taking things that we no longer needed or wanted. Parting ways with these things was the goal. They would be sold at the yard sale and if unsold would end up donated to Goodwill or put in the trash.
We priced things to sell. An entire table was filled with items that we initially priced at $2 each. After we passed the sale’s halfway mark, we reduced them to $1 each. Later we sold the remaining items 2 for $1 and in the final 15 minutes we sold them 4 for $1. We filled the other table with things that were priced between $3 and $20. Some people were happy to pay the price we asked, but many times we accepted offers that were a little lower. When someone made an offer on an item that had gone unsold after it had been seen by dozens of people, we were ready to accept that offer. The point was to get rid of things. We tried not to put much stock in our own opinion of how much a thing was worth. Something is worth what someone is willing and able to pay for it.
We also had a box of kids arts and crafts supplies, paper goods, small low-value items and other odds and ends that we gave away for free. Kids liked looking through the box, which kept their parents looking at what we were selling. A girl scout leader and a couple of grandmothers appreciated the free items they found. At the end of the day we gave several books to kids who were happy to get them.
When the sale was done we had more than $100 (after deducting the $40 we paid to rent the space). You might say that’s less than $10 per hour considering the time it took. But money isn’t the only thing we got. We had some very pleasant conversations with neighbors and old friends. My wife networked with some people in the same line of work. We bought a couple items at very good prices.
One consideration was whether we were better off renting a table at the local church, which cost $40 — or should we have held the sale in our own yard, for free? My opinion is that the $40 for the space in the church parking lot was worth it. The church is on a busy corner with lots of traffic. The many tables overflowing with things for sale and people looking at them certainly attracted attention. We had potential buyers looking at our tables continuously during most of the sale. Our house is on a side street with little traffic. If we had held a solo sale in our own yard, it’s easy to imagine that we would have spent a lot of time alone waiting for buyers. The people organizing the church yard sale advertised with street signs and online announcements, which we would have had to do ourselves if we held our own sale. Overall, I’m happy to have spent the $40 in order to make > $100. (Also, I’m happy making a donation to the church.)
It feels good to convert a lot of stuff we don’t need into money. $100 isn’t a large amount of money, but if we had any credit card or similar debt (not counting our mortgage), we would have certainly used that money as an additional payment, using our choice of snowball. As it is, most of it went into our emergency savings.
