In February, Mark and I sold nearly all of our belongings in an epic 3-day sale (and we gave ourselves just under a month to prepare for it!). Here’s what we learned in the process:
1.) GET HELP!! Seriously – get as much help as you can. We absolutely could not have pulled this off or exceeded our sales goal without amazing help from our skilled and supportive friends. From entertaining our son to sorting through items to staging our house for the sale to spreading the word, bringing us food and hugs, and so much more! Whenever I started to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of this massive downsize, someone was always waiting in the wings to lend a hand and some encouragement. We had incredible amounts of help and will forever be awed by and grateful for all of it.
Side note – don’t underestimate the energetic and emotional components of getting rid of all your stuff – some (and maybe a lot) of that stuff can carry sentimental weight, or can reflect deeper fears or wants. It’s a good idea to have a plan (and in-person support from friends, if that feels needed) for addressing the emotions that might get triggered by a big downsize. For me, it helped to continually bring my focus back to what I wanted MORE OF in my life. To what was true for me, and what was needed and useful and joyful in my life RIGHT NOW. Anything else needed to go. It ended up being a cathartic and revelatory process for me, but there were some tough moments. I’ll be writing a separate post on the nitty-gritty of navigating the emotional and energetic release.
2.) Set an overall sales goal. Don’t get too attached to the price of any one item – select your big ticket items that you’re fairly confident will sell and price them (we looked at online sales groups to get a feel of the going rate of those things), and then lump all the other stuff into smaller price categories – $1, $2, $5, etc. Get a sense of how much you can expect to make, and then decide your overall goal from there. What feels good, fair, and realistically optimistic? Remember that your goal is to get rid of stuff! In our case, everything that didn’t sell would be getting donated. Having the overall sales goal in mind helped us adjust the prices after the first day of the sale. We sold a few big ticket items independently online, but everything else we were willing to drastically reduce in price just to get rid of it! And we still exceeded our sales goal by well over $1,000.
3.) Take card payments! Get a Square reader, a PayPal account, or one or two other equivalents so that folks can pay with their debit and credit cards. Yes, there’s a small transaction fee, but we felt it was more than worth it for the ease it afforded both us, – the sellers, and our customers. People that brought cash were able to spend more, people that came “just to browse” were likely to make a purchase, and we didn’t have to deal with constantly making change or counting the earnings or keeping track of loads of cash. Square was awesome because I got an emailed sales report each day with our total sales, and the money automatically transfers to our bank account in 1-3 days.
4.) Stage, stage, stage! Find friends with retail experience, design skills, and/or organizational mojo to help you stage your house and/or yard for the sale. Pay a professional if you have to! It’s seriously so worth it, especially if you lack skills in this area. I estimate that our sales improved by at least 20% solely because of the staging (shout outs to Elaina and Desireé!!). Some things to consider: ease of viewing sale items, ease of movement through the “store,” pricing visibility, and weather forecast (meaning – have a rain plan if you’ll be using uncovered lawn space!). If you’re selling everything, like we did, consider turning your whole house into a walk-through store, rather than hauling everything outside or to the garage. Set aside one room for the stuff you are keeping and close it off, then stage the rest of your house.
5.) Advertise! Our primary mode of marketing was posting in various Facebook groups. Local yard sale groups, neighborhood groups, and special interest groups (parenting groups for all our kid stuff, photography groups for our gear, etc.). Take pictures of in-demand items, quirky items, etc. Include price ranges, sale times/dates, location, parking info, and acceptable payment methods. Don’t post without pics! They really are worth a thousand words.
6.) Have help on hand, *especially* on the first day. We completely underestimated the volume of both shoppers and sales that we pulled in on that first day. Luckily, I had 2 friends there who saw our slightly panicked faces and jumped in to man the “cash register” (phone with Square reader and wad of cash in pocket) and the line of people waiting to check out. So many people had questions for us about various items or what the heck we were doing with our lives that it was easier to have friends run the checkout process while we answered questions. And super luckily for us, the 2 friends just happened to be amazing saleswomen in their own right, and awesome at quickly but painstakingly pricing out the armfuls of stuff folks were buying, whereas I would just get lazy and round down, or eyeball the pile and say “yeah, $20 is good”. Not my friends. They were sticklers on the pricing, and I attribute another 20% in sales to their attention to detail and “hard-line” pricing stance.
7.) Provide shopping bags. It’s a nice touch, and it really comes in handy when someone is buying a bunch of your stuff. I’d see someone struggling with an armful of books and some clothes or kitchen gadgets, and I’d hand them a bag. And guess what? Instead of checking out right then, they’d usually go back for more! Plus they could get their loot to the car without leaving a trail of dropped items. And since I was using my ginormous stockpile of totes and reusable shopping bags, customers also got a free bag! Til I ran out and started using my stockpile of old gift bags. But hey, eco-friendly shopping.
8.) Celebrate! Take some of that money you made and treat yourself to a nice dinner. Kick back, high five, and enjoy the tingly, giddy lightness that comes with getting rid of so much stuff. Ahhh, freedom.
Leah
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