Canadian Finance Blog

A Great New Year’s Resolution: Sell Your Crap

Posted: 20 Dec 2010 02:00 AM PST

When we moved into our house a hear and a half ago, one thing became extremely obvious… we had too much stuff. Not only was the move difficult with so many boxes, we were also moving into a house that didn’t have any major storage space. We had already drastically changed the way we spend, with no impulse shopping and realizing there isn’t much we actually need, but we still had so much unnecessary stuff bought previously that we were moving around and trying to find a place to fit it all.

After we moved, we knew we needed to do something. We talked about having a garage sale and adding some shelves for storage in our garage. Then a couple months ago Adam Baker from Man Vs Debt released Sell Your Crap, which is 4 pdfs related to getting rid of things in your life that don’t bring you joy, things that make us feel tied down and add clutter to our lives.

So I got the Sell Your Crap – Clutter Crusher Edition and started to read through it. I read the main ebook, and it’s already motivated me to get ready to sell our crap. I haven’t finished all the extra pdfs yet, but I can go through them as I’m trying out all these different tools to sell our items that we just no longer use.

Craigslist / Kijiji

I’ll use both Craigslist and Kijiji for some local sales of larger items. This includes a collection of over 400 VHS tapes and 4 wall stands to put them 0n. We also have an extra bed, a Christmas tree and my DJ equipment and records that we’ll likely sell this way.

Ebay

Over the last 25 years I’ve had practically every video game system ever made, often with large collections of games for each. I plan to use Ebay to try to sell the games individually. This will take some extra effort but it can be worth it since some of the games are rare. Once I’m down to a few games for a system, I’ll likely bundle them with the machine and sell it as a set to get rid of what’s left.

Amazon

Over the 90′s I amassed over 900 CDs. I have them all converted to mp3 and never pull out a CD from the shelf, so there’s really no reason to have them take up space. I’m looking forward to getting these all listed on Amazon as it’s a rather simple process of adding your inventory to the items that are already listed on their site.

Amazon may also be a good choice for listing some video games. This might be an easier way to go if the selling prices are similar.

Garage Sale

Over the last few years we’ve upgraded many of our small appliances and other things around the house. Some things, like old pots and pans, have been relegated to our bin of camping gear. That’s fine since it will still fulfil a purpose. However, we have an old toaster, coffee pot and many more items that we’ll try to sell with a garage sale in the summer. Since we’ll have had 6 months of trying to sell items through the online sites above, any stuff still remaining we’ll add to the garage sale.

Donate / Recycle / Trash

After all the attempted to sell what we can, for as much as we can, we’ll have to look at the next steps to reduce the clutter and get rid of more stuff. The remaining garage sale items will be the first to get donated. We can be patient with selling the CDs and video games, especially if they’re listed on Amazon an require no more work from us.

I have some spare computer parts I no longer need. If I have enough parts to put a complete computer together, I’ll do that and then find somewhere I can donate it to that can get some use out of it. Any remaining parts I’ll take down to our eco-station so it can be properly recycled.

And finally, some of our crap is just trash. It’s not worth selling, not useful as a donation and can’t be recycled. If you really want to declutter your life, sometimes you’ll just have to grab a big garbage bag and start tossing things in!

Putting The Plan Into Action

By the end of 2010 I’ll be done reading Sell Your Crap. Then I’ll need to start getting organized. I’ll probably get the CDs listed first since I won’t need to take pictures and write descriptions.

About once a month, I will update you on how much stuff we were able to get rid of so far and how much money we were able to make while decluttering our lives!

A Great New Year's Resolution: Sell Your Crap originally appeared on Canadian Finance Blog on December 20, 2010.