As I mentioned earlier, my wife and daughter are masters at the garage sale game. My wife’s rule is to never pay more than 10% of what she originally saw the item selling for in the store at a garage sale. By sticking to this rule (most of the time) she has been able to acquire a lot of really nice items for next to nothing. In the early years of my daughter’s life she always wanted to purchase items at full retail when they first came out in the stores. My wife and I would always encourage her to wait until the following summer telling her that she would find it in a garage sale for next to nothing. More often than not, she did. One day she will be a very profitable eBay auctioneer. At one of our garage sales a few years back we ran into a gentleman who was looking for old fishing lures. My wife told him that we didn’t have any, but the he could probably find them on eBay. He then told her how a few years back he had started selling them on eBay and after 2 years was able to quit his job, hunt for fishing lures 3 times a week at garage sales and sell them on eBay more than replacing his previous income.
We like antiques. Hardly a summer goes by when I am unable to locate a few unusual or items priced so low that I just can’t pass them up. With gas prices where they are, I sometimes joke to my wife that we’re spending more in gas driving from sale to sale that we are making in profit. Then we’ll run across a vintage piece of jewelry for $0.25 and it makes it all worthwhile. To cut down on costs, we focus on subdivision or citywide sales where you can park and walk for several blocks and hit a sale at nearly every house.
Estate sales are another favorite. Generally things are priced much too high to be considered a good deal, however, most estate sales are ½ price on the last day of the sale which may bring them more in line with reasonable. However, the best deals are not the half price deals, but rather the ‘leave a bid’ deals. Generally a estate is either purchased by a company to sell or an estate company sells the contents of an estate for a percentage of the sales (usually 20% and higher). The goal is to liquidate the items in the estate as that is how they make their money (I know…. well duh.). If I see something that I would really like to own, but don’t want to pay their listed price, I ask if they are taking bids on the items in the sale. Generally they will have a box where you can place your bid. I then will offer a price (write it out with the info and place the bid in the box) that to most people seems utterly ridiculous. If I win, it’s a good thing! If I lose, I haven’t spent a lot of money on something I probably didn’t need anyway. The results are mixed, however, the times you win are wonderful surprises. For instance, we placed a $600 bid on a grand piano worth several thousand dollars. Item won! We placed a $500 bid on a 1780 long case clock that would be worth over $10K restored. Item won and it only required $1,200 in restoration fees. I’ve even placed sealed bids on items only to have the estate sale personnel chase me down before I could leave and accept my bid (even before the ½ off day!). Another way to win is to call the estate sale personnel after the sale has ended and enquire on certain items you saw in the sale, offering to purchase them at well below the ½ off price.
If you have the time to hunt down the bargains at garage and estate sales, the chase can be very rewarding!