You can't make money flipping estate sales

Now, I don’t think that King Soloman was necessarily talking about buying and flipping used items from an estate sale, but the quote seems to fit anyway. First off, if you aren’t familiar with the wisdom books of the Old Testament, you should read them. They are excellent, whether you are a believer or not.

Here’s the backstory: my wife is an estate sale shopper. You know, when elderly folks either pass away or go to an old folks home, the leftovers from their life gets parsed up and sometimes an auction house is hired to sell it off.

Let me tell you, sometimes it is really good stuff, too. And the prices are sometimes staggeringly cheap. Her latest haul included a John Deere lawn mower. She asked me what our highest bid would be, and I threw out $800, knowing it would go for at least $1,500-$2k on Marketplace.

I’d pretty well forgotten about it when she told me our bid won at $780!

I am not selling this mower. We mow about three acres, and even though we bought a great John Deere mower last summer (you read about it a couple of days ago), we have two teenagers in the house and another pre-teen who is ready to start mowing, so two mowers make a lot of sense.

But if I didn’t need to keep it, that is an easy $750-$1,200 in my pocket, depending on what it fetches. All for doing nothing more than driving 15 minutes away and picking it up.

My point is this: we all are guilty of getting hung up on stupid shit. We can’t settle on a logo, or a color, or a font. We keep tweaking our tech stack. My brother in Christ, this is mental masturbation. You could literally make a bid on a lawn mower, list it on Marketplace, and make more in an afternoon of doing nothing than a lot of low earners make in a week.

There’s an anonymous Bow Tied account, BowTiedBroke, who launched his multi-million dollar real estate empire by flipping items on eBay and Amazon.

Making money from scratch isn’t necessarily easy, but it isn’t all that hard either. Mostly, don’t crap on opportunities. If you get invited to a podcast, take it! You probably aren’t in a position yet to even worry about download numbers and other metrics that matter when you matter more. Just get on the show!

When you see an opportunity to make an easy grand, take it! I am not in a place where making a thousand bucks in an afternoon is trivial, and I doubt I ever will be, and you probably won’t either.

Stop slobbering over shiny objects. Instead, seek out known quantities. Do you have any marketable skills, like maybe Excel? Get on Upwork and market yourself.

That’s right. There are around seven thousand jobs posted that include Excel in the posting. And if you have worked in a boring office job or cubicle farm, the odds are good that you have used Excel.

Money is everywhere, friends. Get out there and grab it.