3:47 PM Tuesday afternoon
79 degrees and humid
Philadelphia, PA
“The Ocean” (Led Zeppelin) is playing on WMGK
I am one final and one walk of the plank away from being a college graduate. I don’t have any work lined up aside potential part time… and I have a total of $25.50 in my bank account and $4 in my wallet. I also am out of food except for some carrots, a little bit of peanut butter, and some soy milk.
Bills and groceries don’t pay themselves, so I thought this might be a good opportunity to document how I pull myself from nothing to something. I’ve got a few skills, so as seeing I have almost no schoolwork to worry about at this point, it’s the perfect time to put all my abilities into action and stabilize my financial situation.
First thing I’ve been planning to do is sell off all my unneeded possessions. I am going to have a garage sale in a couple weeks to pawn off everything I don’t use or need… DVDs, CDs, clothes, old toys, etc… it feels great to get rid of clutter and simplify my surroundings.
Problem is the yard sale won’t be happening for over 2 weeks, so…
I spent a few hours this afternoon putting my valuable school books up on Amazon and the non-valuable books (worth less than $10 to $15 on Amazon) will be sold to the school bookstore right after I finish typing this post.
My strategy with Amazon listings is to list my books equal to the lowest price in almost all cases, no matter the condition. You don’t want to go lower than the lowest price because people have software set up that will automatically change their prices to be a penny less than yours. If multiple people have this software set up, it screws everyone over as the prices will continually deflate.
In the listing I made sure to highlight that the books are in great condition if they are needed for a class. Even if they are worn, all books are good for class use and I’m guessing that students are going to be the ones buying the books. I was thinking of putting some disclaimer like “help out a poor fellow college student!”… actually maybe I’ll go back and edit that in. People are more likely to buy from someone they identify with.
But anyway… that’s my strategy for selling the books the quickest. I don’t have shipping supplies right now, but I’ll just buy envelopes when the books sell. No use in buying supplies in advance.
Next up will be to get a listing typed on to sell my Sega Saturn on eBay or Craigslist, then to go through my Sega Genesis games and maybe sell some of them as well.
I also have Pokemon t-shirts from my website which haven’t been selling… guess it’s time to do a price cut and see if I can at least make back what I paid for them.
Wish me luck and stay cool,
Adam
Edit 6:28 PM: Sold some books to the bookstore and 1 of my books sold on Amazon already. $53.35 gain but I need to ship the book, so that will probably cost me $5 if I’m thrifty. Not a bad turnaround in only 2.5 hours.
Edit 7:00 PM: Sold another $41.60 book on Amazon…what’s going on??? Am I doing something right for once? It must be the “Help a fellow poor college student!” line…
