Emer­gency Cash Tip #3: Sell Your Junk Online

If you’re like most peo­ple, you prob­a­bly have a lot of junk sit­ting your house that you have no use for. You might have

  • an old com­puter or laptop,
  • old elec­tron­ics, old furniture,
  • old text­books,
  • and old clothing.

As far as you’re con­cerned, this stuff is useless.

You won’t ever use it again; and all it’s do­ing is tak­ing up space.

But for many other peo­ple, they would be will­ing to pay for an old com­puter, old fur­ni­ture, or old clothes.

Once you re­al­ize this, you’ll also see that sell­ing junk that you no longer use could been an ex­cel­lent way to raise some cash with­out too much work.

In the past, if you wanted to do this, you’d have to hold a garage sale; and would have to ad­ver­tise for it by post­ing signs on tele­phone poles all over your neighborhood.

If you were lucky, a hand­ful of peo­ple would show up and pay very lit­tle for some of your stuff. But this is no longer the case.

Now, you can use two im­por­tant tools to en­sure that you get a higher price and also close the sale faster: www.craigslist.org and www.ebay.com.

For things like cloth­ing and light elec­tron­ics, www.ebay.com is prob­a­bly a bet­ter op­tion. It is a thicker mar­ket; and will al­low you to un­load just about every­thing you have if you’re will­ing to sell at a low enough price.

On the other hand, www.craigslist.org is good if you’re sell­ing heavy items, such as fur­ni­ture. Since ship­ping would be pro­hib­i­tively ex­pen­sive for most fur­ni­ture, it sim­ply does not make sense to do it on www.ebay.com. If you use www.craigslist.org in­stead, there’s a good chance you’ll be able to find some­one in your area who will be will­ing to drive to your house or apart­ment to pick up the item.

When it comes to us­ing ei­ther www.ebay.com or www.craigslist.org, it’s im­por­tant that you spend time to briefly ex­plain what it is you are sell­ing, so that po­ten­tial buy­ers know what you’re of­fer­ing. It is also im­por­tant to in­clude pic­tures of the items you’re sell­ing, as do­ing this will make browsers sig­nif­i­cantly more will­ing to buy.