If you are looking to make a bit of extra money but don’t have time to commit to a job (or a second job if you are already working) you may not have to look further than your own home. You may be surprised at how much extra money can be found just by decluttering your house.
We have some travel plans this month that I didn’t want to take out of our regular budget so we spent one Saturday sorting through our home and finding ways to make some extra cash. We were able to make over $700 in one day and we decluttered our house at the same time.
One of the most common questions we get from readers is how moms can earn an income at home. Decluttering your home may not give you a consistent income but it can certainly help you pay for a few extra expenses or beef of your savings. This is actually one of my favorite ways to build up an emergency fund (if you don’t have an emergency fund yet, be sure and check out these quick and easy ways to save the first $1000 of your emergency fund).
We didn’t get rid of anything we still use or love so we definitely won’t miss any of the things we cleared out. I love that we got rid of things that were just taking up space because clutter drives me crazy and we earned quite a bit of money, especially when you consider that it only took us a day to do it!
Here’s how we made money by decluttering our home
Sell old cell phones with Gazelle
We switched phone carriers a few months ago and never got around to doing anything with our old phones. Gazelle is a new service we discovered recently that will buy back your old phones (and other electronic devices). They make the process really easy. You just let them know what device you are selling back, they’ll give you a price, then you ship it off. Our payment hit our bank account only a few days later so the whole process was super simple!
I know quite a few families who have old cell phones lying around so this is a great way to clear those out and earn some cash. We sold one phone for $126.50 and another for $335.50 so we made $462 just for making a quick trip to the post office.
Gazelle will buy back your old phones, tablets, computers, and a few other gadgets so it’s definitely worth checking to see what you could get for any unused devices you have laying around your house. You can go here to see what price Gazelle will give you for your old cell phones and other devices and then decide whether it’s worth selling.
Sell through Facebook Sale Groups
I used to sell everything through Craigslist but now my go-to is Facebook selling groups. Most areas have a local selling group on Facebook (we have several in my area). Listing an item is as simple as taking a picture and posting it to the Facebook group. These groups tend to be really active so as long as I price things right I can often sell things within a few hours of listing them.
To find a Facebook group in your area, search “[your city] sale” or “[your city] sell” and see what comes up. Most of the ones in my area have “yard sale” in the group name or “sell”. If you can’t find one, you could always start one of your own.
Each group has it’s own rules so be sure you know what they are before you list anything. Stuff tends to sell really well on Saturdays when everyone is home from work so we had everything ready to go Saturday morning. We did a quick clean up in our garage and pulled out some old things we don’t use anymore including some baby gear, old sporting equipment, and a few old computer parts that we were never going to use. We listed everything throughout the day on Saturday, priced it competitively, and waited. We didn’t sell everything we listed but within a few hours we’d sold $230 worth of stuff bringing our total for the day up to $692.
You could always have a garage sale but when you consider how much time those take to prepare for and run, they just aren’t worth it unless you have a huge amount of stuff.
Return things you don’t need
You may not have this problem but in our house we tend to overbuy with the intend to return what we don’t need. It works in theory because we can take advantage of sales and save ourselves from a last minute trip to the store if we don’t come home with the right thing. In reality, we have bags of stuff sitting in the trunk of the car waiting for us to return them. We don’t usually have a lot of extra time so those trips back to the store are usually last priority. We had some wetsuits we got a killer deal on before Christmas but we weren’t quite sure on the size . . . so we bought all the sizes we might need. A quick trip to the store to return those gave us another $57.
Returning things may not make you a profit but it is cash back in your pocket and you can clear out those bags of returns that are just taking up space.
Our grand total for the day was $749. That’s not bad for a days work!
Look around your house. Whether you are trying to save for a basic emergency fun or a dream vacation, you can probably make a pretty big dent in your savings goals just by decluttering your home.
Do you have any ideas for making some money by decluttering your home? Share your ideas in the comments. We’d love to hear them!
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