A summer experiment at hustling

[LIkeafox]

Someday soon I'll start a real progress thread. But for now this is inspired (ripped-off?) from @RichKid's thread about buying and selling on craigslist. I was reading that thread when I was visiting my mom about a month ago and it inspired me to sell a bass amp I had stashed away at her house from years ago. I posted it on craigslist and didn't get too much play on it. One guy responded and he was kind of flaky, we settled on a price and then he wasn't sure if he had the money and then he had the money but he wanted to talk to his band and finally a couple of weeks after I was visiting he called up again saying he wanted to buy the amp so he stopped by her house, gave her cash and took away the amp.

Yesterday in the mail I got an envelope with the money from the amp concealed in it (it's not really a good idea to mail a hundred dollar bill, this is a tip that maybe isn't covered elsewhere on this forum).

So I've got a hundred dollars (woo-hoo, rich!) and I want to see what I can do with that money.

I'm giving myself till Labor Day weekend. The goal is to have at least $12,800 by then (doubling it seven times in roughly 14 weeks).

My limitations right now are (just putting them out there so when I succeed maybe it will inspire someone else who has some of these to see that it's possible):

• I'm working a full-time slow-lane job plus trying to spend most of my free time taking other action.
• I live in a tiny studio apartment, so I probably won't be trying to buy anything in bulk to then break up and sell.
• I live in NYC and rely on public transportation, so anything I pick up locally to buy needs to be easy to carry.
• Previous to the start of this I have never once tried to haggle with anyone over a price of anything.
• I'm also only using the hundred dollars I started with. An amount that I think just about anyone can come up with to get started on. This will force me to start small and scale up as the experiment goes on.

Rough goals:
6/5 - $200
6/19 - $400
7/3 - $800
7/17 - $1600
7/31 - $3200
8/14 - $6400
8/28 - $12,800

Next week I'll be attending an event where most of the heavy hitters in my niche will be attending. That's going to be the 'official' start of my real action, so this is just a bit of a fun game which maybe if everything goes well I'll have no time to actually play in a week from now.


First Update: Just got an email to pick up my first item Saturday morning.

 

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[LIkeafox]

Found a second item today, shot off an email offering quite a bit less than it was being posted for. A few hours later the seller got back to me and said sure. Picked it up on my way home from work, had to walk an extra few minutes to swing by the guys apartment building. Spent maybe a total of twenty minutes looking at CL and going by the guys place, should easily be able to sell the item for twice the amount I paid. Tomorrow morning picking up the other item and a third item being given away for free from someone whose moving but which I should be able to get something for. If not I'll just give it to the Salvation Army around the corner and take a tax write off on it.

Have a couple of other things lined up to sell, set them up risk-free, just whatever small fees ebay will charge if they don't sell.

 

[twdavis]

How's this going for ya?

 

[LIkeafox]

Decent, but not great. I could give a bunch of excuses, computer died, my jobs been irritating me and bleeding into my non-job time but mostly I have just been unfocused and scatterbrained for the past month.

As of this morning I'm just under $400 dollars off of six transactions.

 

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[Blhhi]

Where are you getting these items? Ebay? Craigslist? I'm really curious about doing something like this just as a side thing for some quick cash (my bank account is almost at 0). I've got an Xbox 360 I'm going to sell on ebay. Considering finding others locally to pay a lowball price and sell on ebay. Have you had any success getting some stuff off of your friends?

 

[LIkeafox]

I've mostly been finding items on craigslist and then selling on ebay. I've done a little bit of looking around at local thrift stores and salvation armies but I don't know if it's New York City or all those reality tv shows showing how much junk can sell for but the prices have been pretty high. My one interaction with a store I asked if I could put the item on hold for a few days and come back with the money and I made sure it would sell in the meantime.

Definitely try lowballing. My first time trying that I got the item for half the price listed and ended up selling it for a bit more than the guy originally wanted for it. Most of the profit was in asking if he'd be willing to sell it for half the price in exchange for cash today.

 

[Blhhi]

Have you tried looking for liquidation sales or going-out-of-business sales in your area? I've done some cursory research into that and didn't find much. It's not the easiest thing to google, since individual branches of a retail giant don't typically do online advertisement of these kinds of sales. But I saw on another thread that a guy got an awesome deal in one of these sales ( https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/community/threads/importing-wholesaling-for-resale-on-ebay.51843/)

I think that's a big opportunity just waiting to be taken advantage of, honestly.

 

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[LIkeafox]

I haven't yet.

This has been a kind of sporadic thing for me, some evenings I'll remember to look through craigslist. When I think of how little time I've spent on this and still have made a few hundred dollars it makes me wonder what the results would be if I got into a daily habit of working on this for a an hour or two.

 

[Blhhi]

Well that immediately catches my interest. You need to get serious about this. I think it would only take so much income before you could outsource most of the annoying work and basically have it be a money tree, as MJ would say.

 

[leveragehacker]

This is great for developing your sales skills and ability to spot profitable opportunities. It's how I started off - made $12,000 profit on eBay selling vitamins till i lost my supply contract.

Remember though, this violates the commandments that MJ talks about in the book - Time especially. After you've had your go with this - do something that scales.

Well done on taking these steps though!

 

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[LIkeafox]

Thanks!

It's not fast-lane. Maybe closer to being fast-lane than being paid a set amount per hour at a job but you still can't fully leverage time in your favor. There is also no exit strategy or liquidation event. Maybe you could turn this into yet another ebook about how to make money, "They All Laughed When I Told Them I Could Make a Hundred Dollars Without a Job... Until They Saw My Monthly Ebay Statement!"

 

[ZCP]

Sit down and sketch out the book now while you are thinking about it. Then fill it in as your journey continues.