A popular tip to help pay down debt and/or ramp up savings is to find things you’re not using and sell them.  It’s easy to fall into the “I don’t really have anything worth enough to justify the effort” mindset.  That’s what I often do.  I’ve held a few all-day garage sales that have yielded me nothing but less than $100 and lots of stress and wasted time (yes, my time is worth WAY more than a few dollars an hour!) and I’ve kind of soured on that idea.

Craigslist has been pretty good to us.  In 2009, we made a killing selling furniture we weren’t too fond of that wouldn’t work moving into a temporary smaller house.  We were able to fund buying all the furnishings we wanted  (bunk beds for the little kids, new bedroom set for us, shelving units up the wazoo, bedroom furniture for Kayla) plus an LCD TV with that money, and we had about $1k leftover, which we slowly consumed for small emergencies and vacations.

I finally worked up the motivation to list some things that have been accumulating around here and I just sold the first item–my old washer and dryer set.  If I’ve estimated how people work properly, we should net between $750 and $1000 if I get everything sold.  That’s exciting because I really didn’t think I had much that was worth selling.

washer+dryer
inversion table
punching bag
double jogger
bike trailer
swing set
unused camera lens

So if you’re crunched for cash or you just want to supplement your income, take a hard look at what you’re storing and hanging onto….it might just yield you some decent financial reward! 🙂