Selling All Your Belongings: A 2021 Guide
It’s not your Grandmother’s yard sale anymore.
As much as I hate to admit it, a whole lot of my life is “stuff.” So it was an endearing, yet difficult, prospect to figure out how to get rid of enough stuff so that we can live out of one sedan and live out of some furnished rentals for a year as we travel around the USA and beyond.
As a quick note, I know there are a lot of yard sale-lovers out there. And hey — I’m one of them…as a buyer! You know why? Because you can find stuff for really, really cheap. If it’s not cheap, it probably won’t sell. This is great for buyers, but I had the time and patience to try to make as much money back on my items as possible. If you’re in a pinch and want your stuff gone within the day, try a yard sale and price things low. If you want to make back your money, keep reading to see what I did!
My Success Story
Compared to my expectations, I was really happy with how much I ended up making by selling my furniture and belongings, so I thought I’d share my experience to give you motivation to do even better! I know you can!
In total, I made $1,470 back on my furniture/clothing/items. Some of my best sales listed below:
- This set of dining chairs I purchased for $80 and sold for $100.
- A cute Target foot bench (can’t find the link anymore) I bought on sale for $40 and sold for $40.
- This rocking chair I bought for $180 and sold for $180.
- This couch I bought new for $315 and sold for $280.
- I made $60 back on bags of clothes I was going to donate anyways. (And I could have made more…keep reading!)
Note: One of the links above is an affiliate link which means I might get a small commission if you use my link to buy something within 24 hours. It costs you nothing and only reflects my true opinions about a product I really did purchase on my own.
Getting the Process Started.
So where to begin? The first step is to obviously take stock of what you have, and how much value you think it has for resale. I made an Excel spreadsheet that broke down how much I paid for each item, the link to the product (if it still existed), how much it is worth today (oftentimes the product had increased in price since I purchased mine), and then made a determination of how much I could sell it for on the marketplace. You’ll probably be pleased to find that, if you used coupons and sales wisely, some of your items could probably resell for similar to or MORE than what you purchased it for, especially if they’re lightly used. I found for even just my small amount of furniture, I could potentially make back up to $2,000. A nice chunk of change! Of course, if you read above, I only made back $1,450. But that is because I decided to keep some of my items in storage and give some that weren’t sold by the last day to some of our friends.
The next step is a bit scary at first: to make a list of what items you’d like to ideally lug around with you in your car. Time to envision volumes! Walk around your home and look through every nook and cranny. Write down in a notepad all the items you would like to take with you. Making this list will be a great motivator for getting rid of more of your stuff. Who wants to lug around stuff for a YEAR that you won’t really be using? Or, on the opposite side of the spectrum, in my case, it was liberating to see how little was on my list! I was feeling pretty good. To see my list and read more about my car-packing experience, read my first Medium article!
For any extra space we had in the car it would be great to bring a basic pot/pan, pillow, extra throw blanket — items that we wouldn’t want to be stuck without.
Leave Your Prized Possessions with Family if You Can.
I saw both sides of the equation — I, on one hand, have parents who are empty nesters and have plenty of space and even more willingness to hang onto some of my things at their home. This helped me a lot. I booked a Southwest flight home, and left two large checked bags full of my “professional” clothing that I probably (hopefully) wouldn’t touch for the next year. We did, after all, just quit our corporate jobs to travel.
Or Consider Storage.
On the other hand, my boyfriend’s parents are still raising two teens, who use up just about all the space there is in the home. So he didn’t have the option to leave his prized possessions with his family. For that reason, he was forced to get a storage unit. We used Extra Space Storage and snagged a small 5'x5' unit for $28 a month. It was within a 10 minute drive from us, and in a brand new and mostly empty building that was totally secure. I was a longtime hater of storage units, from bad childhood memories of trips to a faraway, dirty, dingy storage building at wee hours of the night, but I have to say, I was really impressed with Extra Space and if you can find a brand new building you might be able to snag great deals and have a more pleasant experience.
List on Facebook Marketplace, but List HIGH and List Early.
People will offer way lower (like half) of what you list it at. Be ready for some tiresome negotiation. Make sure you keep tabs on your listings so that you renew them as soon as they’re available to renew. Typically every 7 days Facebook will allow you to renew. This will totally boost your listings when they start to lag. So the earlier you list them, the more opportunities you’ll have to renew, thus the more eyes on your listings you’ll get.
List on Other Free Marketplace Sites or Apps.
By word of mouth, I found out that OfferUp was the most popular listing app for my area (Fort Lauderdale). I absolutely loved it for it’s ease of use and the rating system they use for both the buyer and the seller. You will build a good star rating and you can always sell with confidence by looking at your buyer’s star rating. The platform is only available on your mobile device, but that didn’t pose any real issue for me. If you’ve heard of LetGo, it recently got absorbed by OfferUp, so now it’s a super powerful platform with a lot of interested users.
As with any platform, you have to be aware of scams. Always do your research about typical scams on the platforms you’re trying to use. From my experience, you’ll have quite a few accounts reaching out to ask for your cell #. Never give your cell phone number to a potential buyer. There’s just no reason to, since these platforms are completely free and don’t charge and commission. Just politely respond that you’d like to keep it on the app, and you’ll likely see they were just a scammer who will stop responding. These accounts also typically have no profile image or reviews. This is because they usually get reported and shut down before they can build a trusted profile.
Craigslist is Dead.
I hate to say this, because Craigslist was the OG free online marketplace, but unfortunately I didn’t have a great experience listing here and didn’t find it to be as user friendly or successful as the options listed above.
For one, it is not as user friendly. They don’t have a mobile app, their website isn’t necessarily optimized for ease of use. Also, if you’re like me you actually prefer to get messages exclusive to your listings via the app notifications, rather than emails getting lost in your inbox.
Secondly, it’s so hard to tell who is giving a legit or serious offer, that you almost question why you posted it on Craigslist in the first place. Facebook Marketplace allows you to check out the buyer’s profile and see if they are legit. And some apps like OfferUp encourage rating users for several factors so you can immediately see their “star” rating for huge peace of mind.
Thirdly, I question if, because of the aforementioned reasons, legitimate buyers are staying off the platform altogether. As an example, I listed my car on all three platforms, FB Marketplace, OfferUp, and Craigslist. On the first two sites, it was totally free to list, I got several legitimate inquiries per day, and thousands of views. However, on Craigslist, I was charged $5 to post — a huge surprise to me since they have always been beloved for being totally free — and I didn’t get a single bite. Just one spam message.
For Clothing, Try to Sell To Consignment BEFORE Donating.
With mid-level consignment stores like Uptown Cheapskate or Plato’s Closet, it is super easy to drop off your bags of clothes that you would donate anyway, and see if you can walk away with any cash. Don’t take it personally if they don’t take anything. Hey, if you don’t want your stuff, why would someone else pay for it? If they like any of your clothing, shoes, etc. they hand you your cash, usually within 30 minutes. Don’t be tempted to take store credit — always take the cash! Remember, you’re trying to get RID of stuff! I made ~$60 by taking all my bags of clothes to Uptown Cheapskate first, and then taking the rejects to Plato’s closet.
I am in the process of trying ThredUp for some of the clothing that wasn’t accepted at Uptown Cheapskate/Plato’s. I know they have a pretty high standard as well for clothing, so I am going to use their price estimator tool to make sure I’m putting my most likely to sell clothing in the bag. From what I see, the benefit is that it is a last ditch effort to get some money for your nicer clothing, and if all goes south, you can feel confident your clothing will be “responsibly recycled.” So far I just received my Closet Cleanout Kit and it is a HUGE bag. So you can certainly fit plenty of clothing and even shoes in one kit that is free to send out.
For NICE Clothing, Try Poshmark
Who buys on Poshmark? Beats me. You go on the website and it’s honestly so overwhelming. A million people following you out of nowhere, it’s like a feeding frenzy for old clothes. But since my close friends have had some success selling with it, I thought, why not I’ll give it a try and see if I can list some of my lightly worn clothing for some cash. However — it takes TIME. Listing is quick and easy (and free), but don’t expect to get an offer within a week unless you price things really low.
But Wait! Don’t Donate Just Yet…
Don’t skip this step!! Listen to me — It is totally worth it to post your bags of unwanted clothing on OfferUp and Facebook Marketplace with general images of all the clothes laid out. You can price your bundle of clothes right, think <$1 per item, and see if you get any bites.
For example, I posted a detailed listing of my 3 bags of clothing and 1 bag of shoes, which would be 9 pairs of shoes and 75 clothing items altogether for $75. Better than $0 from donating, right? I screwed up by rejecting an offer for $65 I got the same night in order to wait and see if I could get a better offer. Big mistake! I should have taken the $65 and had that extra pocket change. Instead I donated, which I am also totally fine with, but oftentimes when you sell like this you will sell to locals in your area who have connections with their native country which may be much poorer. Those people often need your clothing even more than your local donation center. The buyer will resell the items for very cheap in those countries, thus helping the individual and the many people who would love to have your secondhand fashionable clothing.
When in Doubt and Desperation, Consider Giving Items you Love to Your Friends.
We happened to have some great friends who just purchased a new home locally. With items that we loved but couldn’t store, such as my area rug, shoe shelf, mirror, and a large potted plant we didn’t know what to do with, we invited them over on our last night and offered the items to them to haul away with their pickup truck. Since these items were really nice and hard for us to part with, they happily took them! Both sides were really grateful and it was honestly one of the best moments of our moving journey.
The best thing about this is that, though it can go unspoken, if you ever REALLY want the item back, you could consider asking your friends. If they’re nice people, they’ll probably consider it!
Good luck!
I came from a family who would never bother trying to sell things and just donate them or throw them away *GASP.* I know we’re all learning that we should try less and less to throw things away due to the immense amount of trash circulating our planet. So why not try to make back some of your money as well? It’s SO easy nowadays with more and more marketplace apps popping up.
Take a stab at it! Give yourself time and enjoy the process! Comment if you are doing/have done this and are finding success! Thank you so much for reading :)
