This weekend is the annual city garage sale in our suburb where the Lion’s Club organizes hundreds of sales as a fundraiser. Yesterday morning there were charter buses, 12 passenger vans, and pickups loaded with stuff bought at these sales all around the city.
Related: Garage Sales – Our Old Crap Can Be Your New Crap
We have good friends from college that have made a business out of garage sales (and estate sales, etc). They are experts in antique glassware, jewelry, and certain kinds of vintage toys that they sell through their eBay store. She quit her job in education a few years ago. He left MegaCorp just last week to focus on their eBay business.
They know exactly what they are looking for because they’ve been doing it for close to 30 years – buying things of under appreciated value at garage sales and then reselling them. Originally they sold through flea markets and antique stores. Now they do it through eBay and have a room in their house dedicated to photographing, packing, and shipping things off.
It seems to be a great little business for them, although like any enterprise I’m sure it has their drawbacks. Still, they’ve sold over 10,000 items on eBay and have a 100% feedback rating.
It is an interesting development for certain – that you can turn your passion for antiques at garage sales into a productive small business.
Do you have any small business intentions in your next chapter?
Image Credit: Pixabay
MrFireStation 
Some day (hopefully in early retirement) I’d like to have the time to review my “portfolio” of the tens of thousands of baseball cards I collected from the late 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. The last time I did any research, the vast majority of my collection was essentially worthless, but there are a fair number of theoretically valuable cards also. At one point, I thought my baseball card collection might fund a portion of my decades away retirement. Now, I’ll feel fortunate if I can turn the collection into a few thousand dollars without having to devote so much time to the liquidiation that it actually turns into a small business!
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I have hundreds – maybe a few thousand – sports cards I collected when I was a kid or as a young adult in the 1990s. I started organizing them last year, but didn’t get real far. I think the sports card market collapsed in the late 1990s didn’t it? Instead of getting the Beckett values, people went online and found so much more for sale. A lot of collectibles got hurt that way.
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I started to convert my hobbies in small revenues. It was not in propose, first I did for my need, now I start to make for friends (no taxes paid:D 😀 ). I proposed myself to put away all these money – and buy etf-s. It is great to see that are “growing”.
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Getting paid for a hobby is fantastic. I know people who ‘invest’ in LEGOs to fuel their LEGO purchasing!
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