A grand in the hand

One of the tangible benefits of downsizing is the money from selling the things you no longer want/need.

We've just hit $1,000 - yippee!

I made a note of each item we sold. Only 4 of them were over $30. So it's not like we had big valuable items. It's just lots of medium and small things. Some for as little as $1. We weren't using them, so to us they were just taking up space. But to someone else they were valuable items.

We did a garage sale early on. It took up about a day, including preparation, and we made $24. It's a nice way to meet a few neighbours, but we didn't do much downsizing. That's when we went online.

We have a bunch of stuff listed on gumtree. It's like an ongoing garage sale but much less work. People can browse at any time of the day or night. All we do is chat online if they're interested - and collect the cash when they come by. (Which has also saved a few trips to the ATM).

It's a quadruple win. Less clutter. Cash in the hand. Free removal. Nothing goes to landfill.

Did I mention one thousand dollars?

PS. For the statistically-minded, we had 74 items. Take out the 4 'big' items, and the remaining 70 items sold for an average of $7. Not big items, but it's amazing how much stuff we have lying around that we'll never use.

Comments

What to do with 128 pens?

I never need buy a pen again. Ever. The pen round-up. I searched the house for pens and gathered them up. We had 128. Woah - that's more than I expected. Then it was test-time. (You can get a lot done watching summer sport ;). Good ones went on the table. Broken ones in the box. Pen operations I saved a few 'broken' pens, by taking working insides and matching them with functional outsides. Particularly much-loved pens, for sentimental reasons, were given a life-extending 'ink transplant'. Final Tally We ended up with 67 broken pens and 61 good ones. And about 10 pencils. What to do with 67 broken pens? In my city Biome recycles pens . It's as easy as taking them into the store and dropping them into the giant collection box. Decluttering and recycling together - I love it. A lifetime of pens An average pen writes 45,000 words. So that dedicated shopping list pen on the fridge could write a 20-word shopping list for 43 years. Our 61 pens repre...

How to waste a year's wages

A friend recently asked me why it is that so many people (on good incomes) are struggling to save. Often the big three money areas are housing, transport and food. In one sense these are necessary items. But what we spend on them is often way more than necessary. I crunched some numbers on how much extra my wife and I could spend on these things - if for some reason we wanted to burn our money. 1. Housing Our apartment is fairly nice, but also cost-effective. I've mentioned how choosing it saves us $1,800 per year , compared to a similar one we saw. The high end of 2-bedroom apartments in our suburb is $305 per week more than our apartment. Not $305 per week. $305 per week more than ours is. I cannot get over that. Sure it's new and modern-looking, but that's a lot of money. It's an extra $15,860 per year above what we pay. 2. Transport The Australian Automobile Association lists the costs of owning and running a car. It includes many often-overlooked c...

Why millionaires don't "feel" rich

We're wealthier than ever - so why don't we feel like it? Australia has gone almost three decades without recession. The stock market recently hit a record high. Our wages are record highs. Home loan rates are at record lows. We live in one of the richest countries in the world at the richest point in history. So what's wrong? Comparison Wealth is relative. So what do we compare to? Where we expect to be? "When your wages growth is only 2 or 3 per cent, you don't feel as well-off as when it's going up 10 per cent. That's that nominal distortion that people often suffer from" , says economist Shane Oliver, and that "expectations have grown a lot faster than reality." We're earning more than last year, but we want even more. So compared to our imaginary situation, we see ourselves as worse off. What we see around us? Shane Oliver again. "If you think about it - Australians today are a lot wealthier. They're living far ric...

But wait... there's less!

Search This Blog