Garage Sale Fail

Over the summer we held a garage sale. And it was an EPIC. FAILURE.

All over the PF blogosphere you read about people who have garage sales and the gobs of money they make. PF bloggers talk about how getting rid of your unwanted item and selling them makes for a win-win situation: you get rid of the item and make a little money and it goes to a good home. You won’t be reading about that here.

We live on a fairly busy street and we get a lot of drive-by traffic so we didn’t advertise our sale the way we should have. (To be fair, in the past, we haven’t needed to because of said busy street.) We put up a few signs on the two main streets that cross our street.

We prepared everything the night before. We got things ready to be set out. We dusted old items. We priced items. We cleaned off tables to hold items.

The next morning, we got up early, set up our tables, and proceeded to set up our wares.

We had a good selection of items. We had some clothes, shoes, house ware items, games, toys, small appliances, crafts, and books.

Last year, The Husband’s parents moved and they gave us a lot of their unwanted items to use in our garage sale. Because we are remodeling our kitchen, we also had a ton of kitchen items. And we had a lot of items that we had been collecting for the last year because we knew we wanted to have a garage sale.

I was hoping to make a couple hundred dollars to put towards our debt. But we didn’t, not even close.

We made $39.

All the effort we put into our garage sale was hardly worth it. $39. For our efforts, that works out to about $3 an hour. So not worth it.

At the end of our sale, we packed all our wares straight into the back of the car and dropped it off at Goodwill.

The silver lining of the day was that during our garage sale, The Kids ran a lemonade stand. We have a lemon tree so they used lemons from our tree. They set up a table and had signs. They sold their lemonade for $.75 a cup. People walking by bought some, cars stopped and came back to buy some, cars turned around to buy some, random people just stopped and gave them money. Even though the lemonade cost $.75 per cup, most people that bought it just gave them a dollar and told them to keep the change. Some of their friends made a special trip to our house just to purchase lemonade from them. Those things made the day worth it.

Our kids made more money than us during their sale and when we divided up their money we stuck to our 50-40-10 rule for spending, saving, and tithing that we talked about here.

I’ll be honest, the next time we think about having a garage sale, I’m going to think of that $39 and really have to decide if it’s worth it or if I’d just rather have the tax deduction!

Have you ever had a garage sale? How successful were you?