How To Sell Everything You Own

When I found out our house was closing a bit sooner than I had expected, and we had 4 weeks to sell everything and move, I was a little overwhelmed. As the queen of to-do lists and check lists, I wrote down a time line for myself and started there. After experiencing the chaos of selling so much in a short amount of time, here are some tips I have (just in case anyone is crazy enough to want to do such a thing).

1. Give yourself plenty of time. If I could, I would have started 2-3 months in advance. That way, you don't feel pressured to take a low offer just to get something off your hands.

2. Begin by posting your large furniture and expensive items online. I mainly used Facebook because I could take the pictures with my phone, and post them to multiple Facebook yard sale pages in just a few clicks. If that didn't generate much interest, then I would post it on other websites. People are willing to pay more for things listed online than at a yard sale, so try to do this with as many items as possible.

3. Set a time frame for pick ups. Choose 2 or 3 times during the week that you are available for pick ups. Otherwise, you will have people coming around the clock and it is hard to get anything done.

4. Ask for people to reserve necessities (bed, couches, etc...), by paying for them and agreeing on a pick up time right before you move. This way, you are confident you have a buyer lined up that won't back out, but you don't have to go 2 or 3 weeks without a bed.

5. Write down what you sold, who you sold it to, how much you agreed on, and when they are picking it up. I did not do this, and it quickly became hard to manage and remember what I had agreed to and with who.

6. Once furniture and more expensive items have been sold, prepare for the biggest yard sale of your life. I put the things I was keeping in my living room, and moved everything else into the garage. Once it was in the garage, I began organizing it into bins and boxes by price and category.

7. Advertise, advertise, advertise.

8. Take the time to display items at your yard sale. The sale began with several things in bins and boxes. Some people were willing to go through them, but some people only wanted items that they could quickly see. Luckily, my Mom was there helping make everything look good: hanging clothes, setting up the tent and hammock, shining dishes, etc..... I was so overwhelmed with people coming to ask me about prices that I wouldn't have had time to do that. I'm so glad she was there! Make sure to have extra help!

9. Once our traffic died down and the only things left were pretty random, we announced that for $5 you could come and take whatever you could fit in your car. By this point I didn't care about the money, and the main point was to get as much taken away as possible so there would be less clean up for us! All that was left over was one load to Goodwill and we were done!

When we first weighing the pros and cons between selling everything or storing it, we estimated making around $3000 to sell it all. Storage units are pricier than I would have guessed, and we felt that selling it all and starting over some day would be less costly, and less hassle. Once the yard sale was over, we counted everything up, and the grand total was a little over $7000, not including selling our motorcycle, cars, or house. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it's more than we were counting on!






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