Yard Sale: Part II

Guest post by, my mom

One of the first steps in planning to have a yard sale is figuring out if you actually have enough stuff for a yard sale. Go through your home and set aside a yard sale pile (some people do this throughout the year, others do it all at once). Once you know what you're getting rid of, you need to start pricing your items. CHEAP is the name of the game here. I know, I know. Some people take their yard sales REALLY seriously. And that's fine. For the purpose of our yard sale, we were looking to get rid of stuff and make a little money, not start a part-time career of wheeling and dealing. We also shopped around a bit to find out "typical" prices in our area. Since this was the first time we were having a yard sale, we wanted to know what the going rate for items was. Again, we were looking to unload the stuff--not make a second living.

We did a multi-family yard sale, so we took some advice from Crystal and used a different color sticker for each family. Each family then priced their own items. On the day of the sale, the sticker was removed when the item was purchased and then stuck to a piece of paper. This made it easy to add up how much each family made at the end of the day.

While we were doing research on prices, we also looked around to find out the typical days/times that are yard sale-friendly in the area. It might seem like a no-brainer that a yard sale would be on a Saturday morning, but I found out from a friend, that in Ohio, THURSDAYS are the hot yard sale day--who knew!! So, researching when to have your yard sale is just as important. I would have guessed that yard sales would have started at 7am, but in our area, most start at 8am. Again, it's worth a quick look on the internet and around your neighborhood to get this kind of info!

In the last installation, I'll let you know how it all worked out...