It’s garage sale season again, and many of you are no doubt looking around at all of your own piles of junk, wondering if a garage sale is the best way to get rid of your stuff.
At the last major garage sale I hosted back when I was in my 20s, I inadvertently wound up selling practically everything I owned. I had a little brownstone-style apartment with the door to the street, and set up my tables of junk right outside the door. It was warm and sunny, so I left my door open. As the day progressed and my tables cleared, a woman noticed my couch and asked if she could see it. “Sure,” I said, and before long I accepted her offer to buy it! Someone else followed and noticed my drapes. “Sure,” I said, and before long I accepted another offer for the drapes. And on it went until my living room was nearly empty!
Since I hadn’t planned to sell this much of my stuff, you’d think I would have been seriously depressed, with nowhere to sit, no drapes on the windows, no comforting stuff around—but it was just the opposite. I sat on the floor in the middle of my nearly empty apartment and felt an absolute, joyous freedom. It was a profound sense of lightness and relief!
Even though I eventually replaced the couch and a few other things, I never forgot the feeling of lightness I experienced that day—knowing I could turn on a dime, with few material possessions to worry about or weigh me down.
If you like the idea of hanging out, relaxing, and getting to know your neighbors, garage sales are wonderful. When is the last time you planted yourself outside in front of your place and had nowhere to go for a whole weekend, or at least a whole day? With just a little pre-planning, your garage sale can be fun and effective. Here are a few ways to make it a good one.
- Host your sale on a non-holiday weekend. Many people leave town on holiday weekends, so find another date (unless your house is on a main route in and out of town).
- Host it with other families. The larger the sale, the more people will be attracted. Plus, you’ll have more fun and camaraderie, and it’s also safer. Most people who go to garage sales are great folks, but scam artists are not uncommon. One will distract you while the other makes off with your stuff.
- Always keep your money on you—in a pocket, apron, or fanny pack. Hide your larger bills in a separate pocket. You should also start the day with about $100 in all variations of small change.
- Price your things about one-quarter or so of the cost to buy new, and always mark your items with a price. To make pricing easier, you can use colored markers and keep a list: all green marks are .50, red is $1.00, and so forth.
- Make it festive! The longer you can entice people to hang around, the more likely they’ll buy something. Play lively music, sell lemonade or homemade punch. You can also get your kids involved. If they’re old enough, they can make cookies and brownies and sell them—whatever it takes to keep people entertained while browsing through your stuff.
- Provide an electrical source if you’re selling anything electric. Bring an extension cord outside with you so people don’t have to traipse through your house or garage to check your appliances.
- Bundle smaller items—especially clothes. Since adult clothes don’t sell well at garage sales, you can put a bunch of them in bags and sell each bag for $2.00. Make sure the bags are sealed shut so you don’t have people pawing through them.
- Put up an “ALL SALES FINAL” sign. Believe it or not, some people do try to bring stuff back!
- Make a rule that nothing comes back in your house—unless it’s something valuable that you can sell elsewhere. To make it really easy, schedule your sale for a Saturday so you can still get to Goodwill or another charity on the day of the garage sale to unload whatever didn’t sell. If the charity is closed, then load up your car with the leftovers to be taken away the next business day.
Another option is to leave the items on the sidewalk and put up a FREE sign. I do this a lot without garage sales. I just put free stuff outside on the sidewalk, and I’m always amazed at how fast it disappears.
- Know that garage sale fanatics will show up at least an hour early. I’ve made some good sales to these early birds, but if you don’t want the hassle, put up a sign the night before: “Garage sale opens at 9:00 a.m. All items will be sold at a 50 percent mark-up to buyers who come before 9:00.”
Garage sales are also the perfect way to earn a little extra pocket money that you can blow without guilt. You can earn pretty decent pocket change—up to $300 or more.
If you do get together with a few neighbors or your whole street and host a combined garage sale, then you can then spend the proceeds on a really fun neighborhood party—tequila and Mariachi bands aren’t cheap, after all! Or you can keep your earnings as your own entertainment fund and use it for movies, dinners out, plays, and short road trips. Have fun!
If you want to be more practical, garage sales just might provide the nest egg you need to start investing, if you cannot seem to save or invest a dime.
Here’s how the investment plan works. Say you are 30 years old and earn $300 at your garage sale this year. You invest it into an IRA and get an average return of 5–8 percent. You add another $300 every year—that’s only $25 per month, so you have no excuses. With compound interest, you’ll have around $35,000–$40,000 when you’re 60.
Granted, this isn’t a load of money, but it’s money that grew pretty painlessly, and an extra $40,000 is a decent pile of money, no matter which way you look at it. Plus, would you rather be 60 years old with an extra $40,000, or 60 without an extra $40,000? You’re going to be 60 either way.
If you’d rather not spend your time hosting a garage sale, you can still donate your stuff—you just won’t do as well financially. Say your donations have a fair market value of $100. If you itemize your taxes and are in the average 15 percent tax bracket, you’ll only net a $15.00 savings on your taxes.
Garage sales are also not the answer for you if your stuff is more valuable, such as nice furniture, antiques, jewelry, heirlooms, and so forth—pretty much anything over $75.00. That’s because the average garage sale buyer is after shamelessly-cheap deals. They are prepared to pay very little for anything. You’ll do better by listing your more valuable items on sites like craigslist.com and ebay.
Craigslist.com has a list in most major cities, and is a free service where people can list everything from bathtubs to jobs. I recently sold an antique oak table on craigslist and made $250.00. It cost me nothing to post. If you do decide to have a garage sale, you can list your sale there, too.
Craigslist is where I go first to sell my bigger or more valuable items. If I don’t get a bite there, then I go to ebay. If that doesn’t produce my buyer, I’ll try listing an ad in my local daily newspaper classified ads, or I’ll try consignment stores in my neighborhood.
You might earn around $300 on your garage sale, but how much did you spend to buy all of this stuff in the first place? If you figure you get about one-fourth of the cost of the original, then you probably spent around $1,200 or more.
Garage sales can be great fun, but what I’d really like you to do is get to the point where you no longer have enough stuff to sell at a garage sale. You can do that by fine-tuning your level of discernment—choosing only a very select few things that you will allow to cross the threshold of your life.
Trust me on this. You will save yourself an incredible amount of time, money, stress, and hassle by learning to get off of autopilot shopping. That’s because each shopping trip—no matter how small—takes at the very least 30 to 45 minutes, including travel time. Multiply this by all of the shopping trips you make each day and week, and you’ve spent a huge chunk of precious time. If you shop more carefully, you could save yourself at least three or more hours a week. Plus, every item you bring into your life requires a lot of your time to care for, rearrange, dust, and repair. Think you have no time to relax? I just found some for you!
So take a close look at all of the stuff you are trying to sell or give away—everything that you no longer use or want—and estimate what you’ve spent on it in terms of time and money. Eye-opening, isn’t it?
My friend Helen Sherpa has lived in Nepal and the U.S. She once told me an especially poignant lesson that I’ll never forget. “In Nepal,” she said, “We have need-based shopping. It never occurs to people to buy products they don’t need, because there is no advertising, no sales, no junk mail, and no credit cards. Also in Nepal, because people walk to the neighborhood store, they buy only what they can carry home, and then make do.”
Helen says our lack of connection with the person who made the item encourages waste. “In Nepal,” she says, “You have a tailor repair your garment. In the West, we have no idea who made our things, so it’s easy to give it all to charity—out of sight, out of mind, and, as a result, we generate huge quantities of waste.”
Finally, she added, “We seem to be awfully busy here in the U.S. But at the end of our lives, have we really achieved more than the simple farmer, and will we remember we bought 12 pairs of pants instead of 2?”
My guess is we won’t remember how many pairs of pants we bought at the end of our lives, and we won’t give a hoot. Instead, most people seem to reflect on what kind of human beings they were—what kind of friend, parent, child, neighbor, or community leader. They remember their passions, and they remember the people and causes they helped.
Since my blow-out garage sale in my 20s, I’ve hosted only a couple of small garage sales, and then stopped. There are two reasons for this. First, as I’ve gotten more aware of what I’m doing as I shop, I buy fewer things. I ask myself if I really need or love the thing I’m about to buy, and then I ask myself what I’ll do with it, and where I’ll put it. I’ll also question whether I want to take care of whatever it is. I still buy things, and I still buy some things just for the fun and pleasure of it—shoes, for example!—but I am so much more discerning that I now have less and less to toss, sell, or give away.
Second, I purge my unused things regularly, so my piles never get large enough for a garage sale. I simply take them to my favorite donation store, which supports unwanted animals, and get my donation receipt for a tax write-off. If the item is more expensive, I’ll sell it on craigslist.com.
Before you haul all of your stuff out to the curb for your garage sale, I’d really like you to stop and take a close, close look at everything. Take a mental note of where your time and life have gone in order to accumulate these things. Then ask yourself if this is how you want to continue spending your time and money in the future. If you’d like to change course, then after your sale, start fresh by shopping only with a very careful eye.
The Heirloom Dilemma
As if you didn’t have enough trouble keeping up with your own stuff, what do you do when you inherit another houseful of belongings from a loved one?
Run and hide? Wait! I have some plans for you. I have my own set of heirlooms, and in nearly every talk I’ve given about simplicity, someone in the audience asks about heirlooms. This always sparks a lively discussion. I’ll tell you exactly what I tell them.
Simple living rule #1:Thou shalt not hang on to anything out of guilt, lest thine home become a den of overwhelming clutter and despair.
Next, you need to ask yourself the really tough questions: is it love or guilt? Remember that your deceased relatives probably could care less about these material things now that they are floating in the ether. Therefore, there’s no need to hang on to their stuff out of guilt. They’re free, so why should you be burdened?
Making the Love Distinction
First and foremost, you need to distinguish between the heirlooms you really love and the ones that just produce guilt: For example, “My grandma hand crocheted this pink toilet seat cover—how can I get rid of it?” That’s probably guilt, not love.
Be very, very discerning when making this distinction. It is much, much better to keep only a few special things that you can look at, use, and enjoy than trying to hang on to too much. If you keep too much, you won’t be able to appreciate what you have, and you’ll start feeling overwhelmed and resentful. ‘Tis a far, far better thing to be left with fond memories of your deceased relative—and you can do that by being very selective about what you keep.
Using this filter, place the things you truly love in a separate place. Now divide the remaining items into piles according to value. Garage sale type items go in one pile. Medium value items go in another pile, and really valuable things in a third pile.
Now decide if you want to earn money from the more valuable things or whether you are willing to give them away to other family members. Put aside everything that you want to earn money on.
What You Can Do Without
For the items you want to give away, start by calling all of your blood relatives, followed by non-blood relatives, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. You’ll feel better in the end if you give these heirlooms to people who have some connection to you. Plus, you can always visit the things if you want to take a trip down Memory Lane. After you have exhausted your search for good homes, try charities that have meaning for you, and then keep searching until you find the best home possible.
For the remaining items that have either sentimental or monetary value, take pictures of each item and put the photos in a nice album. After our beloved grandmother died, my cousin went around her home and took photos of the rooms, just as they were. This little album means as much to me as the actual furniture, because it brings back all of the wonderful memories we had in her house. Even though you can’t take photos in the person’s home, you can still take them of the items that mean something to you, but that you can’t keep in your home.
Finally, sell the things that are valuable, but you don’t want to keep. First, offer to sell them to relatives and friends, and then try public places like ebay, craigslist.com, or auction houses. (To find a good, local auction house, do a Google search or call higher-end antique or furniture stores and ask them who they’d recommend.)
Relish What You Love
Now you’re left with what you love. But what if you don’t have room? If they’re that important to you, sell something else in your home to make room for these items. Do not try to hang on to both sets of furniture, for example, or you’ll start resenting everything. I inherited my grandma’s bedroom set and for me it was a no-brainer. I sold the one I already had to make room for hers.
The bottom line is to keep things moving and move them as quickly as you can. I’ve known people who wound up with a houseful of things from a deceased relative, and, due to guilt, confusion, and inertia, they lived in absolute chaos and clutter for years because they felt paralyzed and couldn’t make decisions. I can’t imagine that any relative who loved you would want you to be burdened by their material possessions after they die, so start letting go.
If you find yourself getting stuck, get help. Ask a friend or two to come and help you move through your heirlooms. (Better to ask friends rather than relatives, since friends have no emotional connection to the stuff.)
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