A couple of months ago I decided to clean up my apartment. I realized that I had a ton of extra stuff that was just taking up space. In fact, a lot of it was old electronics, old video games, baseball cards, and some paintings. I didn’t want to throw any of it away, but I thought it would be convenient to have more space. I decided to sell a bunch of items that I hadn’t used in years on eBay. This would unlock some value from some otherwise worthless items lying around my apartment.
I am no stranger to eBay. When I was much younger around 13 or 14 I believe, I sold Ty Beanie Babies online and baseball cards. In fact, that is how I started amassing wealth. The first couple thousand dollars I ever saved was from online sales, I think. When I was a freshman in college, I also sold my $500 dollar bill on eBay for around $1000. This time around would be no different I thought to myself even though I had more items to sell than I ever had before.
While I sold much of the more prominent baseball cards when I was younger, I still have a huge box of lesser cards that I decided to now sell. They sold rather easily albeit I had to sell a lot of them to make a decent amount of money. Other things I sold included my old Sony Clie NZ90 handheld device (which was beautiful when it came out years ago), iPad 1st generation, a bunch of old Xbox games I never play, a few paintings that took up a ton of space, and a bunch of other one-off things. All in all, I have sold around 200 items for a total of $6,432.38. It took a lot more time to list things and package them for selling than I thought it would.
I have already deposited the $6432.38 to my investment account where I will watch it grow and compound until I retire. I figure at an assumed rate of return of 10% for 30 years the value of selling of these otherwise useless items will come to about $127,000 when I am 55 years old. If I never need the money and decide to let it grow until I am 80 years older then it will have amassed into a little more than $1,500,000. This is a small fortune that I can pass on to my heirs. And all from what?…selling a bunch of old items that I had packed away over the years. This $1,500,000 would throw off more in dividends every QUARTER than the original investment alone! That is an incredible generation of wealth.
If you have a lot of stuff in storage at your house that you will never use again then why not sell some of the items that are non-sentimental and have no value to you? The free cash can be used for Christmas presents, bills, or investment capital. All great fortunes start with savings and selling old items around the house or apartment is a great way to give your savings a jump start!
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