Welcome Back, Future Funder!

You know that people talk about how you need to find a side hustle and maximize your income, right?

Well, what if your side hustle money is literally sitting in your attic, garage, or basement right now?

And all you need to do to get ahead on debt, a down payment, or your investments is to take some pictures of your old stuff and post it online?

Don’t believe me? I’m walking proof! I’ve made a modest couple thousand doing this kind of stuff myself.

So today, we’re going to show you how to crush your financial goals by selling what you’ve got in your attic, your closet, or under your bed.

In today’s issue of Dinner Table Discussions:

✅ How Selling Your Old Stuff Is the Ultimate Financial Hack
✅ The Items That Are Like Gold in the Reselling World
✅ What’s the Best Place to Sell Each Item?

Bon appétit! 🧑‍🍳

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🍽️ Main Course: Turning Clothes, Pokémon Cards, and Antiques into Cash

Alright, you might think this kind of thing is not worth your time. But you’ll probably think differently after reading through how simple this stuff is.

I myself have made a couple thousand dollars selling old trading cards, video games, clothes, and books. It’s not hard! (I’ll share more on that in a bit.)

And unlike other side hustles that cost you money to even get started, reselling your old stuff costs zero dollars because you already own it all. Sunk costs and all that.

Another reason you should sell your stuff is because you literally aren’t using it, and it’s probably just taking up space.

If you don’t want to let go of your things for sentimental reasons, that’s understandable. But if you’re honest with yourself…

…Do you really need that set of furniture in the attic you “can’t give up” even though you have no plans to ever use it?

Or do you maybe just have some hoarding tendencies? 😬 

People throw around the word “hoarder” a bit too lightly these days, and I’m not saying you are a hoarder. Just that the mindset of “I can’t get rid of these things” is not a very logical one most of the time.

To summarize my thoughts on keeping old stuff:

A few things in your attic that you keep for sentimental reasons? Great ✅ 
An attic chock full of things you don’t need and will never use? Not good ❌ 

And the final reason that you should sell some of your stuff is that you have financial goals in life: getting out of debt, saving for your kids’ futures, investing, buying a home, etc.

And those items sitting in your basement or garage are literal piggy banks of cash that you aren’t opening and putting toward your goals (yet)!

Just something to think about 👀 

What Are the Best Types of Items to Try and Sell?

As someone with personal experience flipping old stuff for profit online, I don’t think most people understand how easy it is to do and how valuable your old stuff can be.

Personally, the area I’ve had the most success in is with collectibles and nerd culture stuff (e.g., trading cards, video games, Blu-rays).

But there are even bigger markets for furniture, antiques, clothing, and everyday household items.

So to start, here’s a list of things that are generally easy to sell. The list isn’t exhaustive, and there are certainly other things you could come up with and add to it. I’m just mainly focusing on things most people might have lying around in their closets, attics, or garages that would likely sell quickly online:

• Clothes: this one applies to everyone, whether you have vintage clothing items from decades ago or just some clothes you bought earlier this year and don’t want anymore. The main requirement is that the clothes you want to sell are in good (or decent) condition.

  • Example: I put a Patagonia fleece up for sale on Mercari (or was it Poshmark?) for $40. It sold in literal minutes. What did I learn? That I should have priced it higher 😅
    

• Shoes: sneaker heads go crazy for collector’s editions or vintage shoes, but you don’t have to have original Michael Jordans to make a profit. Even just some decent tennis shoes or boots you don’t wear anymore could get you $50-150, depending. And that’s money you didn’t have before! You can check StockX or Ebay to see how much your shoes might sell for.

  • Example: I know it’s hard to part with your 2nd pair of Adidas Ultraboosts (resell at ~$65) and those leather boots you never wear (resell at ~$75), but if you did, you’d be about $140 richer!
    

• Trading cards: we’ve all heard the stories of people finding $10,000 Pokémon cards in their old childhood collections, but odds are that you don’t have a golden ticket card sitting in your attic. However, you’d be surprised how many old baseball, basketball, Pokémon, and Magic: the Gathering cards sell for $15-$50 each. Use sites like TCGplayer.com to check the value.

  • Example: I was a nerdy kid who loved trading card games. Little did I know that my old hobby would earn me over $1,000 dollars in college when I started selling the rare ones on Ebay! And card prices just keep going up now with inflation. So crazy.

• Video games: the retro video game market is alive and well. Shoot, your games don’t even have to be retro to sell. Some of the most valuable ones are the older games though, since newer best-sellers get remade so often. If you have top titles from the PS2, Xbox, and Gamecube era and earlier, you could make some serious cash. Here’s a video game price indicator website so you can price yours.

  • Example: it was never fun to do this, but when desperate times hit, I’ve sold plenty of old video games. All told, I probably earned about $1,000 total (old Nintendo games sell especially well).
    

• Books/Blu-rays: ever been to a used book store? You’d be shocked at how much you might make by trading in your used books, Blu-rays, DVDs, textbooks, and boardgames. Yeah, they’ll probably give you half the price you could get for selling each item individually online, but are you going to individually sell 200 books for $3 each on Ebay? Probably not.

  • Example: this category is where bulk really pays off. No, my old copies of classical literature, textbooks, manga, and Blu-rays weren’t worth much alone. But when I sold 100+ of them at once, it came out to like $200 total.
    

• Antiques/Collectors items: This is a wide category that includes a lot of different items. You can sell your old jewelry, coins, stamps, first edition comic books, vinyl records, art, furniture, and more. You’ll have the best luck if you research what’s popular at the moment and sell into the trend, but even if your antiques aren’t in style right now, they might be in a year or two.

  • Example: if you sell the wooden table in your garage that’s just taking up space ($50), your vinyl collection that you don’t care for much anymore ($100), and the china plates that you hate but are actually decent quality ($75), well… you just made $225 to clean out your junk. Not bad!

You can sell plenty of other things too, from used lawn equipment to bicycles to silverware. We just wanted to focus on some common items that you’ll be able to find buyers for somewhere.

But where are those buyers, you ask?

Where to Sell Your Stuff

Alright, you’ve got some stuff in mind that you want to sell, but you don’t know where to sell it.

We got you.

You have multiple options for most items depending on your goal, time frame, and patience:

Selling Clothes & Shoes

Right off the bat, we’ve got 5 different marketplace options for clothing.

You’ve probably heard of the clothes-selling apps Mercari and Poshmark. Then there’s Ebay. Next is Etsy. Then Facebook Marketplace.

• If you value speed, ease, and safety, go for Mercari or Poshmark.

• If you want the highest price for your item, go for Ebay.

• If you’re selling handmade or super bespoke items, use Etsy.

• And if you want to avoid fees for cash transactions, use Facebook marketplace.

Selling Trading Cards

I’ve personally had the best success with Ebay when it comes to selling trading cards. You can typically get decent prices for them and you reach a wide audience. However, the fees are high and people will try to haggle you down in price.

If you’d rather not deal with listing individual cards, you can always try to sell them in bulk on Ebay… or just take them in to your local hobby shop and see if they buy individual cards.

Selling Video Games

Here, you have three options.

• Ebay: sell your games here to get the highest price and widest reach. You’ll just have to list them all individually and ship them all too.

• GameStop: sell your games here if you want to get it over with in 30 minutes flat. They WILL give you awful prices for your games, but it’s easy.

• Your local video game store: the main advantage of a local shop is that they’ll probably buy your retro games, while GameStop won’t. These places still give you bad prices, but they’re fast like GameStop.

Books/Blu-rays

I have quite a bit of experience with this too, and my strategy is pretty straight forward:

• If I have any specific books or Blu-rays that are collector’s items or hold significant value for some reason, I’ll sell them on Ebay to get a good price

• If I have a ton of old books that are all worth $0.25-$5, I’ll just load them up in my car and take them to my local used book store.

This strategy saves time but also maximizes the dollar value I get for the higher-cost items.

Antiques/Collectors Items

My recommendation for these types of items is to use a mixed approach of Ebay and Facebook Marketplace. You can even list items on both at the same time!

Ebay gives you national (or global) reach that you wouldn’t get elsewhere, so it’s great to keep your items there and get a bunch of eyeballs on them. But Facebook Marketplace gives you local exposure that Ebay and other platforms just don’t provide as well.

Honestly, I’d say you should list all your antiques and collectibles on both of these platforms at once (unless you have hundreds of them; then choose Facebook Marketplace if your items are more regional/local taste, and Ebay if there’s an audience everywhere in the country for them).

Note: If you’re selling gold or jewelry, you should probably go to a local jeweler. You could sell that stuff on Ebay, but I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable with it since those items are so valuable.

Bottom Line

Overall, the best side hustle is one that gives you a decent amount of money for a relatively low amount of time. Reselling items you already have in your home takes very little focused effort (though it can require patience if you use Ebay or other marketplace apps) and can net you a solid amount of cash depending on what you have!

Seriously, I bet that there’s something on that list that you could sell for a profit. And you could take that money and put it directly toward your financial goals.

Savings? Check. Paying off debt? Check. Investing? Check.

All paid for by your garage, attic, basement, or closets.

Cheers to getting 1% better each week! 🥂

👂 We’d love to hear from you

👂 What old stuff have you resold before?

We’d love to hear about it! And your story could inspire someone else to do the same.
Just hit reply and share.

Thanks for reading,
—Your friends @ Future Funders 🍽️

P.S. Forward this to a friend who’s got thousands of dollars in old stuff sitting around. 😁