Hi there!
Do you like money? I know I do. I mean, really, who doesn’t, right? Do you want to make some more money but aren’t sure how? There’s something so simple that you can do and you can start doing it today – and no, it’s not growing your own money tree. I tried that with some “magic beans” some guy traded me for my lunch. It didn’t work. All I got was a stupid bean-stock weed that grew high into the sky. Yeah, great, like I could do anything with that!
Okay, here’s the story of how I made $10,000 selling all my stuff.
A few years ago, my wife and I made a plan to move abroad in the near future. That near future became 2014. We researched a few countries, and in the end, Panama won – and that was well before it was voted happiest place on earth – which it was voted shortly after we arrived, probably no coincidence there. Anyway, when we finally decided on a date to move we knew we would have to do something with all the stuff we owned. We could have stored it. We could have listed our house as a “furnished” home. But we decided we should cash in and try to recoup some of that money we spent accumulating said…stuff.
We started by selling stuff online.
This has to be one of the easiest ways to make money selling your stuff. Websites like Craigslist, EBay, EBay Classified (USA), Kijiji.ca (Canada), Auto Trader and others were a huge help. If you’ve never used these sites they’re fairly simple to use, but there are some tricks to using each one in a way that you maximize both visibility and profitability.
In addition to selling stuff online, we had yard sale after yard sale, or garage sale after garage sale, depending on where in the world you’re from and which term you choose to use. And let me tell you, those get tiring, but you get to order pizza because you’re too busy to make anything…at least that’s what we told ourselves. But the money can be great if you get decent traffic, but in order to get traffic you need good signage…you do know about signage right?
It’s not always easy though. The hardest part of selling all our stuff was just that – parting with stuff. Some of our stuff had sentimental value. Some of our stuff we over-valued. Some of our stuff we under-valued. And some of our stuff we just didn’t want anymore. When we no longer needed things like dishes and kitchen wares, we made several donations of said stuff to local charities, like shelters and soup kitchens.
The cars we owned were from 2001 and 2002, and they sold for a combined $3800 CAD. As for all of our household belongings, we made $6200 by selling all that stuff (that’s a lot of stuff)!
But all that worked paid off, and when the sales stopped and the stuff was gone, we had made $10,000.
Selling all our stuff allowed us to live in Panama for an entire year!
Many travel and “overseas retirement” magazines boast of cheaper costs of living in Latin America. I’ve been in Panama for just over a year now, and looking at our expenses for the past year, I can attest to this. It’s true. It is cheaper to live here. You do know about tracking expenses, right?
If you don’t know how to track your expenses, or about yard sale signage, or how to price things, don’t worry, these are all detailed in my e-book available on Amazon: Sell All Your Stuff and Move Abroad
As I mention in the e-book, it’s not like I’ll never buy stuff ever again. I know I’ll need some stuff along the way, but this time around I will be much pickier when it comes to the stuff I choose to buy.
1 thought on “How I Made $10,000 by Selling All My stuff”