We’ve all been there. Our home is just full of stuff we no longer use, and there seems to be an infinite amount of it.
You can sort it from pile to pile, but as long as you’re keeping it, you’re not addressing the root of the problem.
As time passes, our homes tend to become cluttered, and while some don’t have a hard time saying goodbye to their possessions, others like to store them and sometimes even keep them in pristine condition for their entire lifetime.
It’s not hard to decipher exactly why this is an unhealthy relationship to possessions, and it’s part of why people who actually think about their future usually throw out their old stuff, or at least, sell it online.
Yes, you heard us correctly, none of your old things have to go in the bin, but rather, you could even turn a nice profit on them, handing them to an owner who might actually need them a whole lot more than you would.
Make priorities and keep only the stuff you know is important, and you may soon begin to notice some change in your life.
Declutter for a profit
If you’re already in the middle of decluttering your home, you may have noticed that it’s full of things you no longer need.
However, once you find these things, the last place they should end up is a trash can, and instead, you should be looking to make use of them one last time and turn a profit by selling them.
You know what they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and there’s no reason to just give that “treasure” away.
While it is fairly simple to sell things, online or through a yard sale, there are still some things to keep in mind, and you’ll want to research this thoroughly before committing to becoming a salesman.
The first step is finding a place to list your items, and the internet offers a near-infinite resource of information and platforms to list your products on.
Facebook Marketplace may be one of the more commonly used online markets, and it’s where you may want to begin selling your stuff.
Prepare to answer A LOT of questions
When you post an image of a vintage clock, there’s a lot more to the item than just the clock itself, and describing every little detail about it in a limited text box can be quite difficult.
To help offset this, you may want to plan ahead and take multiple pictures of the item you’re selling, from every angle, and this is particularly true for furniture, as the condition furniture’s in can often be a selling point.
Even though the questions potential buyers may toss at you will sound difficult at first, soon you’ll realize that you can easily answer most of them with a yes/no answer, and when you’re doing this, you should try to be as transparent as possible about the item’s condition and attributes.
On top of this, you should try to answer these questions as quickly as possible, as no one likes having to wait around just to be given an answer they didn’t want to hear.
Price out your competition
Whenever you’re trying to make a profit by selling something, always expect there to be competition, and the one surefire way to beat them is to adjust your prices.
With your prices being the lowest the customer can possibly find, it’s easy to rake in a hefty sum of money, and even if there isn’t any competition, overpricing your goods never pays off.
Even if you do absolutely need the money, if you pump up your prices to the point where the items you’re selling aren’t affordable to their target audience, you’ll soon begin losing customers.
Furniture tends to depreciate over time, and even if you do believe that your vintage nightstand could be worth hundreds of dollars, it may be best to sell it for $50 instead.
Provide inventory for other sellers
If you’re not particularly fond of dealing with customers yourself, there’s always a solution, and that would be selling your items to an antique store or some other reseller in the area.
By doing this, you’ll ensure that you’ll sell each and every one of the items you were planning on throwing out anyways, and by doing this, you spare yourself the trouble of actually interacting with the customers.
This removes a lot of stress and pressure from you as a seller, although the downside is that you’ll have to sell your items at a considerably lower price than you normally would, as the reseller also has to turn a profit to make their purchase worth their while.
Final word
If you’ve been living in your home for a longer period of time, there’s a high chance you’ve got an entire storage space full of items you no longer use.
These items are often referred to as clutter, and they’re taking up valuable space that could be put to better use.
If not for this, you may want to get rid of them simply because they’ve got no real value to you, but this doesn’t mean that everyone feels the same way about them.
Something that may have been worthless to you may just be what someone else has been looking for for a long time.
If you choose to get rid of these items, why not at least try to make some money off of them, putting them to use one last time while they’re still in your possession?