Skip to main content

Could you make an extra $4,200?

Gumtree did a survey to find out how much unwanted stuff Australians have. The answer was $4,200 of per household. That's a lot of money to be tied up in items that we don't even want.


Across Australia this adds up to 34 billion dollars worth of unwanted stuff. $34,000,000,000! That's a lot of stuff just sitting around.

It's probably even more

The survey said the average household has 25 unwanted items. So far my wife and I have sold more than 300* items, with another 60 already listed and more items still to be added. Surely 25 items per household is just the tip of the iceberg.

What do you think?

How many unwanted items do you have at your place? Do you reckon it would be more that 25?

People are cashing in

It's estimated that 100 million items were sold second-hand last year. Millenials are leading the way making almost $2000 per person.


In the last year 56% of Aussies have sold something second hand, including 1.3 million people making their first online sale.

Tips for making thousands

If you'd like to turn some of your unwanted possessions into money, you might like my free ebook Less Clutter More Cash. It's a collection of tips that we've learnt in the process of selling more than 300 of our unwanted items. Hopefully it can help you too.

PS. See my related post 4 Reasons to sell unwanted items

*Update: We've now sold 557 items. So the 25 per household seems to be quite a conservative estimate.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

My October challenge

Decluttering can be overwhelming. I've been stuck. Shelves and boxes and drawers full of stuff I should go through but not sure where to start. Aaagh - there's so much of it. The solution? So for myself (and for you if you want) I've developed a strategy. I've picked 31 categories in advance. I plan to tackle one item per day of October. If I miss a few that's OK. The point is to overcome overwhelm. To focus on one thing at a time. To move forward instead of being stuck. My favourite way to declutter is to sell online . (I even wrote a  free ebook of tips for selling online). I also like to recycle or upcycle things. Wanna join in? I've chosen categories where I think most people would have excess. If there's a category you have already dealt with, that's cool. Have a rest day - or go even further in one of the previous areas. The list Ok so here's my plan for this October. Bookmark this post or download the picture of my notes. For each category I ...

5 Reasons why we hoard - and they're wrong

"Less is More" is one of the catch-cries of downsizing. Often the fewer things we have the more we value them. So it's a great title for a book that's basically a manual for how to de-clutter your home. The introductory chapter of Less is More: How to De-clutter Your Life gives some great insights into why we find it so hard to reduce our stuff. Here are 5 of them - the last one is one of the biggest for me. 1. The cost of holding on. We were raised by our parents and grandparents and in their day items were expensive and space was cheap. It made sense in those days to hold onto stuff just in case you ever needed it. But today housing is expensive and items are cheap. It's hard to change a habit, but now we save much more by downsizing. 2. Keeping it in the family. For some reason we prefer to give things to those close to us. Again this was viable in the days of big families and lots of children to receive hand-me-downs. But these days we have smaller fa...

20 unplugged ideas

May 1-7 is Screen-Free Week . It's about spending time away from the screen and more time with each other - or doing things we love. It's a great chance to break the work-tired-watchTV-ads-shop-work cycle. This list of twenty alternative ideas is great for screen-free week. It's also a great reminder of things we could enjoy if we're shopping and spending less - and maybe working less and enjoying life more.