Blogging Away Debt

How to Sell A Tub of Little Cheap Toys at a Garage Sale

While going through my son’s toys for our upcoming garage sale, I ended up with a huge container of cheap toys. You know, the ones that you get from parades or from fast food meals. It’s amazing how many you can accumulate through the years.

I have found toys like these for sale or for free at garage sales and usually there is quite a selection by the time I get to a sale (around noon – I’m a late garage-saler). In fact, the last time I had a sale I had a tub of them and was asking five cents each. I still had almost the entire tub left, except for a few furby happy meal toys that two grown-ups started fighting over (that was pretty interesting to see!).

Anyways, I came up with an idea that I think will help us sell the toys since even when you put a “FREE” sign on them they still hang around.

We have some paper lunch bags around and we will fill the paper bags with the toys. They will be little mystery grab bags that my son can help sell. We’ll mark them for a quarter each or 5 for $1.00 and have a box of them by my son’s toys and also a few near where I will be stationed for people to pay.

I think everyone loves a little surprise and for the price they could sell. Thinking of being at a sale with my son, I’d pull a quarter out of my pocket so he could purchase a little surprise bag of goodies.

Next month, after our sale, I’ll report back on here how well it worked. In the meantime, if you have any other suggestions I’d love to hear them. My goal is to get rid of all of these cheap toys and make a little bit of money doing it.

I’ve Created a Garage Sale Monster!

by Tricia

I decided a little bit ago that I am going to have a huge garage sale this summer. The problem with doing that is that it is a lot of work. My son is 5 and I figured I would let him help Momma. I had no idea how much he would enjoy it!

Sunday we started going through all of his toys and books. There were toys that I thought he should keep but he wanted to sell them. In all, he’s probably only keeping a tenth of his toys. He really surprised me with how much he wanted to sell.

Today while I was working, he came into my office and asked if he could price a few items that we didn’t get to yesterday. I showed him how to write the price on the masking tape and how to cut it and let him have at it.

He decided he wanted to sell his Tonka road grader. I was surprised at that because he loves his trucks, but I let him price it…$30.00. Mom will change it before the sale, because no one would pay that much for something that cost $15.00 new. I can’t blame him for thinking big!

That went out the window, though, when he told me what he’s selling his train set for. It’s a Geotrax set that mom and dad went WAY overboard with buying additional pieces. In all, I have never seen a set of this size on eBay and it has well over 300 pieces. When put together it takes up an entire room. It’s insane. Anyways, he said he was going to sell it for 99 cents. We’ll have to work a little bit on his pricing skills 🙂

After I got off work, one of the first things out of his mouth was, “You ready Mom for more garage sale stuff?” I think I created a little garage sale monster! It’s a good thing, though, because he’s helping to keep me focused with doing a little bit every day and it’s giving us a chance to discuss a few things related to finance. A key point…we bought way more than we needed to.