How To Turn This Years Spring Clean Into Cold Hard Cash

you've completed your spring clean and the Family car resembles this!

You’ve been round your home and decided to have a mass de-clutter of junk that you’ve bought in the past and didn’t need in the first place or that you just don't use any more. Don’t just send it all to land fill or give it to charity. The stuff you think is trash could be worth a small fortune. As the saying goes “one’s mans rubbish is another mans gold mine.” Sell as much of it as possible on eBay or Amazon. You don’t have to sell it all in one go, its marathon not a sprint. Spread the work out and take your time to get it right this way you will earn more money from your auctions and have less complaints from buyers.

Not only do you get to spend the extra cash you make as you like your also helping the environment. We’re all so much a part of the throw away, buy new society, we have to reduce this as much as possible and every bit counts. Also some people can’t afford to buy new so your also helping people that maybe are not as well off as yourself.

If you want to sell on eBay you will need to set up a seller account. It’s simple process to set accounts up with both eBay and Paypal and there are plenty of great guides around to show you how to do that. These are a couple of good Hubpages I’ve found that will show you how to set up an eBay account and how to set up a Paypal account. Once you’ve completed the account set-up process your good to go and can start selling pretty much whatever you want straight away.

If you’re selling your own personal stuff and not making any profit you don’t need to register as a business. However if you’re looking at making a profit out of what you sell, I strongly recommend you register as a business and pay any tax on the profit. Ivan the taxman is starting to look in depth at eBay, Paypal and Amazon as well as a lot of other selling web sites. The taxman is demanding to know who has sold what and for how much. Don’t get caught out, register as a business and pay what’s due on any profit to Ivan.

When you’ve got all your items together go through each one and value it. This process does take some time but the results will be well worth it. You’ll need a load of post it notes. Once you have the value of an item, write it on a post it note and stick it to the item. You won’t remember how much its worth when you come to list it and you’ll have to do it again. If you’re not sure how much something is worth do a sold listing search to see what similar items have sold for recently. DON'T do a live auction search i.e. what people are trying to get for these items. I could ask for a £1000.00 for a modern plastic biro pen, it doesn’t mean I’m going to get a £1000.00 for it.

You can save time and quite a lot effort with some of your auctions by breaking some of the items into bundles. For example if you have a lot of CD’s first go through each one to find out if you have any that are valuable, sell these individually. However the vast majority of your CD Collection will be worth very little. In this case bundle some of these CD’s together (I use bundles of at least 6) Put them in artist order first of all so if you’re a big Madonna fan, bundle all her CD’s together. Once you’ve made the bundles up by artist go into genre types i.e. Country, folk, pop, rock & electronic. Finally if you have any left, bundle mixed artist and mixed genre but increase the bundles as you'll get less for them ( I use bundles of 16 or 17). The same can be done with books, DVD’s & old console games. There are a couple of exceptions. If you have a full set DVD’s such as all the films for the Harry Potter series or Star Wars. You may have full or part set of Grand theft Auto games on the PS2. These can do really well sell them together as a bundle. The full set of Grand Theft Auto games on the Sony PS2 is really popular and always fetches really good money; even a part complete set does really well. That’s it enjoy, eBay hard and have a great healthy, wealthy New Year.