Entry #115 - Craigslist

Friday, 06 March 2009 18:19

craigslist

Ok. I know I've neglected this blog for awhile now. My bad. Once you get OUT of the habit of blogging, it's really hard to get back into it. There are just too many other things to do. And since I'm not a very good writer, it usually takes me a long time to craft an entry. But at least I always have lots of ideas! Does that count? I even keep a "blog ideas" text file on my computer. Unfortunately, those ideas rarely turn into real blogs. But from this point forward, I'm going to make an effort to revive this thing and resurrect it from the dead. So to the two of you who are still subscribed to this blog, thank you for your devotion. I AM BACK! (Well, at least for this entry.)

So, today's entry is about: Craigslist. Man, I love me some Craigslist. Craig was one smart dude. It's the local garage sale. Where people will buy the crap you don't want. It's where you can sell ANYTHING. And I mean ANYTHING.

I'm blogging about Craigslist for two reasons:

(1) Today was my biggest day in terms of unique Craigslist transactions. I had 5. All 5 transactions had nothing to do with each other. I bought 2 things and sold 3 things. One person came over to the house, I drove to someone's house, I met two people at the same Exxon gas station down the street, and I met someone at the Slick Willies pool hall.

(2) If you aren't a Craigslister, you need to be. In this crappy economy where everyone could use a little more cash, I'll bet that you can find at least $1000 worth of crap in your house that you could sell. Seriously. As my buddy Ryan Schooler would say, it's a bunch of money just sitting there in your close, attic, or garage. Every 6 months or so I go through a Craigslisting binge where I'll look for stuff to sell and get rid of a few hundred dollars worth of stuff. Trust me on this - instead of throwing stuff away, sell it on Craigslist. People will buy your junk. And we won't discuss whether this income is tax free or not. I'm no CPA.

Just for fun, I looked up my Craigslist stats in Quicken: My first ever transaction was back on March 2, 2005. Since then, I've had 186 Craigslist transactions for a total dollar amount of $9,953.27. (Yes, the $0.27 is weird. If I remember correctly, I have the $0.27 in there because someone owed me $2 more for something but didn't have the extra money so he simply gave me all the change he had. I'll take it!). Can you believe I'm almost at the $10,000 milestone? I hope to be there by the end of the weekend!

Of those 186 transactions, only 11 of them were purchases. 175 of them were sales.
Of the $9943.27, $8,984.37 were sales. $968.90 were purchases. Of the $8,984.37 in sales, $5,410.62 of it was for stuff related to my saltwater aquarium, which I also sold through Craigslist, btw.
My largest sale was $500 for a washer and dryer set.
My smallest sale was $5.00 for a super crappy camelback-wannabe hydration pack.
My largest purchase was a fish tank for $400 (which I sold for a super awesome $25 profit, btw.)
My smallest purchase was $5.00 for a women's Terry Butterfly bike saddle (awesome deal).
My best purchase (by far) was a Weber Genesis Silver B grill. I am SO happy with this purchase. These are normally $500 grills, but I got it for $80. Granted, it's like 5-6 years old, but it still works AWESOME. In fact, both the self-ignition AND the thermometer still work! I had to drive all the way to Steiner Ranch to pick it up. The dude was totally loaded. He had a built-in grill in the backyard by the pool, so he didn't need the grill OR the money. He was asking $100, but sold it to me for $80. He also gave me a grill cover, the original Weber grilling manual, and 2 extra propane tanks full of gas! That's like $30 bucks worth of gas right there. Anyway, I couldn't be more happy with this purchase. I never realized how important the grill is. Before this grill, I could never grill food correctly, and I just thought I sucked as a cook. But my 20-year-old grill died and we got this one, and voila, now I can cook! I truly believe that grilling is 90% grill, 10% griller.
My worst purchase so far has been a Women's Specialized bike for $75. At the time that I purchased it (a month ago), I didn't know anything about bikes. It sounded like a good deal (they wanted $100 at first) and I just picked it up quickly because women's hybrid bikes are hard to come by on Craigslist. It turned out that it needed a TON of parts and repairs and even after having a bike repair guy fix it up (yup, found him on Craigslist too), it still needs a few parts. I hope to get it into really good working shape soon, but I know I overpaid for it. I hate that. I was just stupid and not educated about what I was buying.

This is starting to become a pretty long post, so I'm going to split it up into two parts. I'll post more in a few days. Hopefully, I have accomplished my mission of getting you to at least CONSIDER using Craigslist to get rid of all the junk you have and turn it into something productive (money) which can at least buy you some food and gas.

Comments

peylin (163.126.18.xxx) 2009-03-17 07:24:58

dude this black is really hard to see! it's hard for me to fill in my name.
anyways i like reading your blog. then again, i'm probably one out of the two
that still does huh? =P will you sell stuff for me on craigslist?? i'm too lazy.
you can also have a % of the $$$.

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Title

RS (67.79.218.xxx) 2009-04-29 09:30:05

You continue to remain my idol - both in total frugality and in tracking stats
via Quicken. You rock - I appreciate the shout out in the blog ... my blog is
about to get revived as well - I suddenly have more free time!

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