Full Transcript for $1,000 in a weekend

1: Where do you start looking? 00:02:54 Speaker 2: I would go straight to the storage columns. Even people who have– and I wish I had found this stat, but there's a huge amount of money we spend as a country on storage solutions, like off-site, so like storage lockers. 00:03:07 Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. 00:03:08 Speaker 2: And so I would be– if you have storage off-site, I would go straight to that because that's stuff that's been out of sight, out of mind– If you manage to survive without it this long, you probably can look at selling and obviously saving that money that you're paying on storage as well. But even just going to the cupboards that you haven't opened for a while, the drawers, the things that have gotten pushed to the back that you can barely see anymore because you're not using them. 00:03:32 Speaker 1: Under the bed. Yeah, under the bed. 00:03:34 Speaker 2: What do you keep under your bed? 00:03:35 Speaker 1: Don't you keep stuff under your bed? 00:03:38 Speaker 2: Actually, my bed's one of those gas things that you can lift up and down. 00:03:41 Speaker 1: I'm sorry, what? 00:03:42 Speaker 2: What? Yeah, you know those, like it's got storage underneath it but the mattress goes up at an angle? No. And that's where we keep our Christmas tree stored. 00:03:50 Speaker 1: Really? 00:03:51 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:03:51 Speaker 1: Do you know that once when I lived in Canberra and when fireworks were legal and you could go in and buy them. You kept them under the bed? I once, yeah, stocked up on fireworks. This is many, many years ago. And then we didn't end up setting them all off on the long weekend when you're allowed to. So I'm like, that's fine, I'll store them. stored them under my bed for 12 months, which in hindsight is a terrible, terrible thing to do. Surely that is a high-risk activity. 00:04:22 Speaker 2: Especially these days with things that, you know, with cords and phones and like battery chargers and power banks. 00:04:28 Speaker 1: Highly combustible. Yeah. 00:04:29 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:04:30 Speaker 1: Anyway, I survived. Clearly, I'm here. But anyway, I still think back and go, oh, that's probably unnecessary risk. But also, how about you risking, what if your gas bed mounts malfunction and suddenly it's like bang into the wall in the middle of the night? 00:04:47 Speaker 2: No, I'm pretty sure with Tom and I in the bed and the dogs and the kids, it's not going to be. It's more likely to collapse, I think, with the weight and pressure. 00:04:54 Speaker 1: All right. So anyway, we've established that maybe you can look under the bed. 00:04:58 Speaker 2: Yes. 00:04:58 Speaker 1: And there might be stuff under there worth selling. Looking around your house, what categories of stuff tend to– have the most value kind of sitting unused. I imagine everyone would have some electronics, there would be furniture, clothes, kids stuff, which is so high risk that is. 00:05:21 Speaker 2: So you've got like kitchen gadgets, things that you,

you know, appliances that you've purchased and you just don't use anymore or you've got something that's multifunctional that now you've got almost like a duplicate. So you can definitely look online to see if you can sell those. Kid stuff, particularly baby stuff, can actually sell quite well depending obviously the condition of it. You've obviously got to take into consideration obviously making sure the hygiene is acceptable to actually to sell it, the demand, the platforms that you're actually going to be selling these things on. Then there's sporting equipment, water skis, even like clothing, like the outfits. If you've got kids that don't fit them anymore, tennis rackets, all those sorts of things where people– go out and buy all this stuff and they never end up using it. 00:06:09 Speaker 1: I love the way your brain works. Rather than going to, say, golf or something, the second suggestion that you had that people could sell is water skis. Let me just duck down to the garage and grab my spare water skis and pop them on Marketplace. 00:06:24 Speaker 2: People do this, though. They try it once and think, oh, I'm going to do this, and they're going to spend a whole pile of money, and it never sees the light of day, gathering dust. 00:06:34 Speaker 1: No, that is... Um, that is absolutely the case. How though, do you, how do you decide what to sell and what you will regret getting rid of? And these are questions coming from a borderline hoarder, right? I always worry that, oh, okay. Maybe I might need this one day. I'm better off keeping it. How do you psychologically make those decisions? 00:07:03 Speaker 2: If you haven't been using it and you cannot see an immediate need where you will be using that. 00:07:09 Speaker 1: You're not going water skiing in the next six months. 00:07:12 Speaker 2: It is time to release that and to look at the lesson and to think, you know what? The water skis are going to go to someone who's actually going to love them. They're going to use them. They're going to appreciate them. They're going to be used for what they were built for. And move on. Don't let that pull you down in life like having that mindset does not serve you and also think about the space you're freeing up as well yeah it's going to be so much easier to keep your home organized and clean and neat with less clutter around yourself and also i'm a big believer in looking at the water skis and feeling guilty feeling ashamed regretful wow i spent that much money on those water skis and i never have used them or i haven't used them for so many years and i don't plan on Like you don't use it as a form of punishment. 00:08:03 Speaker 1: That is probably the next big one, which is this idea of, hey, I paid 500 bucks for these. If I get rid of them, if I sell them for $ 100, then that's kind of $ 400 that I've wasted. I'm better to keep it. And at least then I'm not crystallizing the loss, right? 00:08:22 Speaker 2: Well, not necessarily. Again, you can

use this to actually think about, okay, well, I've got a lesson here. Clearly, I have an overconsumption or I am shopping mindlessly without thinking things through, maybe some impulse purchases. But the other thing is, say, for example, I sell something for $ 100 and I then use that money wisely. I say, for example, put it onto my home loan and say I've got a $ 650, 000 home loan and say I'm paying about, say, 6.5% interest. That would actually save me about Just over $ 400 in interest. Okay. So you can't think like that. Obviously, that's a situation where someone's got a home loan. Not everyone has a home loan, but that money might be the birth of your investing strategy. 00:09:06 Speaker 1: Yeah, and you might actually kind of almost make more than the value of it. 00:09:11 Speaker 2: Exactly. 00:09:12 Speaker 1: In the long term. 00:09:13 Speaker 2: It's literally money that's sitting there. It could be doing something productive in your life rather than, let's be honest, collecting dust. 00:09:19 Speaker 1: Okay. We are going to take a very quick break. On the other side, you're going to give us a bit of a masterclass in selling online in order to try and accumulate this $ 1, 000 this coming weekend. Back in a moment. All right, Canna, we are talking about how to find $ 1, 000 in your house this weekend. You've gone to the garage you've looked under the bed you've gone into the cupboards you've pulled out all the stuff that you don't really use you haven't used it for six months so therefore you're probably not going to be using it in the next year or two years and you don't need it where do you sell do it does it depend does the right platform for selling stuff like this depend on what it actually is you. 00:10:07 Speaker 2: Do need to do a bit of research to know what is i know but if you want to get the best value like the best price it it pays to do this research beforehand okay I am a huge fan of Facebook Marketplace. 00:10:20 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:10:21 Speaker 2: Because it's often within your community. Then, of course, Gumtree. Then you've got eBay as well. And another one I find really successful for clothes is actually Depop. 00:10:34 Speaker 1: How though? We have planned many times. Sian and I have planned like when she cleans out her wardrobe and she's got a bunch of dresses and things. She goes, I'm going to put these on Depop. And then you just go, oh, but how do you make sure it looks good? How do you take the photos so that it's lit well? And what background do you use? It just becomes too difficult. And so they go back into the wardrobe. 00:10:57 Speaker 2: You're making excuses. 00:11:00 Speaker 1: Correct. 00:11:00 Speaker 2: So look, set aside an hour and say, you know what, I'm going to use this hour to get as many items listed. A bit of a cheat sheet is to search through your phone and search that outfit. So within Apple, I can type in red dress and it will bring up photographs of me wearing a red dress. Hopefully I've

got a photograph there of that red dress that I'm trying to sell so that I can use that in the depop listing. Of course, I can crop my head off if I don't want people to know it's me, but that's a great way to help. You know, make it a bit more to get you going because they get you started. 00:11:31 Speaker 1: Oh, so you don't have to list it as like hanging on a hanger or something. 00:11:36 Speaker 2: Well, obviously the more photos you can include the better. 00:11:39 Speaker 1: Okay. 00:11:39 Speaker 2: But at least you've got a photo, like a lot of people like to see clothes on someone so they can see how does it hang? How does it look? It's going to improve your sales. But if you think about it with your phone, it's so quick and easy to do. You pull the dress up, you hang it up. You take a few different photos from different angles. and then list it and off you go. And obviously you put in the video description, it's not video description, you put in the Depop description, the labels, but a lot of these apps, selling platforms actually now have AI within it. So it can sense the dress. So I'll put say a Zimmerman dress, it will pick up from seeing the label on the photograph Zimmerman, the size, the colors, it will also come with hashtags. It'll be like lace frilly, colorful dress, And a lot of the items can actually almost pick it up exactly what you're selling, even sometimes the name of the style of the outfit. 00:12:29 Speaker 1: Oh, wow. 00:12:30 Speaker 2: So it's really fast. 00:12:32 Speaker 1: Pricing, though, and I suppose you need to do a little bit of research for this. Is it generally better to price aggressively and undercut other people on there in order to get rid of something, or do you hold out for the highest possible price because it feels like that suddenly then takes up so much more time? And you're not valuing your time effectively if you do that. 00:12:55 Speaker 2: It's very subjective. If there are things that, you know, you're really attached to and you're, you know, you're selling because you know you're not going to use it again, but you still really love that particular item, then it doesn't hurt to maybe put it at a price so that you feel happy to let it go. But there's also times where you think, you know what, I don't need this. 00:13:12 Speaker 1: I don't want this. 00:13:13 Speaker 2: I'm just happy to let it go. And also, I don't want this dragging on because it's eating into my own time. I'm happy just to sell at a price where it moves quickly. And you can also say in your listings, I've got 20 other things listed. Go and check out my online store. I'm happy to combine shipping or I'm happy to offer discounts on two or three different items if you purchase. You can start moving things in bulk, essentially. 00:13:37 Speaker 1: What stuff, though, isn't worth the time and hassle of trying to sell? Because I really do like this idea of decluttering. And trying to, and turn that into money, especially if we're setting ourselves a target of a thousand dollars. And I can see if you were selling, say you had a, an old TV or something, or you're selling a PlayStation or something that you just don't use and you're able to get a hundred bucks or something for it. I can see the value in doing that. And, and okay, we do this across the weekend and you put a whole stack of clothing items and you can build up to a thousand dollars over a weekend. you might need to have a larger, a big ticket item, like a bed or something in order to get to that thousand dollars over the weekend. But it feels like below a certain level, it's just not worth the time and the hassle of trying to sell certain things because suddenly you're listing things for 10 bucks or five bucks. It's just not worth it. All those messages from people marketplace saying, hey, is this still available? And you write back to them and they just ghost you. 00:14:46 Speaker 2: Look, I think you'd be surprised as to how many things are actually worth selling. And even like I've seen situations where people have sold things that are broken because people want them simply because of their parts. And they're actually businesses that are buying them for their parts. I've also seen situations where people are actually selling bags of stuff. So they might have baby clothes. You think, oh, why would I go and list this onesie you know, on Facebook Marketplace or Depop, you know, but what if you got all of the baby suits that you don't actually fit or all of the outfits that don't fit and sell them in a batch? So you can't buy them individually. You have to buy the bag. And that person who's buying them knows that they're getting, you know, a mixture of different things all within that one bag that costs $ 50. That's then possibly, I think, worth your time. And I've seen people do this successfully, and I know people have done this successfully. 00:15:34 Speaker 1: Okay, so you're batching stuff. Okay. I like that. Do you know what I bought the other day on Marketplace? 00:15:39 Speaker 2: Oh, tell me. 00:15:40 Speaker 1: So I rarely shop on Marketplace. I was just cruising, and I saw someone had listed 10 minutes prior a bundle of things. There was a long-handled shovel, very exciting, a rake, There was a sledgehammer, like a mattock, a crowbar and all of these other things. And I had a couple of them, but the rest of them, I just, I needed these for doing a bit of kind of landscaping work at home. And just, it was like divine intervention. 00:16:11 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:16:11 Speaker 1: I needed a few of these things. I needed that sledgehammer to break up some concrete. I needed some of these other bits and pieces. The whole lot, the shovel itself would have been worth like 60 bucks. The whole lot bundled. For $ 50. There you go. And I was on that like lightning. Picked it up. It turns out they were just around the corner from me. Picked them up that same afternoon. And honestly, I have never been more

satisfied with an online purchase. Of course, I've now added to the clutter in my garden shed. But my God, I enjoyed that. 00:16:43 Speaker 2: You know what? You can now share those things with your neighbours and help them save money too. They're doing a bit of gardening. 00:16:48 Speaker 1: That's a good idea. So you create a little... Community. Community. Yeah, I like that. Okay. Um, How though do you avoid kind of doing what I just talked about where you kind of declutter, but then you sell 10 things and you just fill the space with five more. It actually requires a bit of a mindset shift, right? 00:17:07 Speaker 2: I think it's really important to be really present as you're selling things and you're going through your stuff and having to have those uncomfortable, honest conversations where you say, well, wow, that was a lot of money and I actually never wore it or I never used it or, you know, it, didn't quite meet my needs, or I probably should have researched more because it wasn't actually what I was really looking for. Those conversations can then help you become, I think, a better consumer, a better shopper, and help you think about how long it takes to earn money and how quickly we can spend money and how things quickly drop in value. So I think if you can open yourself up to the lesson or the message or wisdom here, that can help put the brakes on for when you next go shopping and need to, you know, replace those things or perhaps not replace them at all. 00:17:56 Speaker 1: Okay. You've made $ 1, 000. 00:17:59 Speaker 2: Okay. 00:18:01 Speaker 1: You've sold a bunch of stuff. And as I said before, probably some big ticket items in order to hit that $ 1, 000. What do you do with it? And it feels- Go shopping. Why not? It feels a bit unfair. God, imagine how many shovels I could buy for $ 1, 000. That'd be amazing. Like what are. 00:18:19 Speaker 2: You doing in your backyard? 00:18:20 Speaker 1: Yeah. Burying dead bodies? Don't ask. No, no, no, no one's. No, no. God, you've thrown me now. 00:18:28 Speaker 2: Nothing to see here. 00:18:29 Speaker 1: No, nothing to see here at all. No, but if you have $ 1, 000, it doesn't feel fair to ask you this when you've only got a minute to answer. But that's a decent cash injection at a time when most households are pretty cash poor. 00:18:44 Speaker 2: So I would say put it towards a goal, a financial goal, something that's stressy. If you're worried that you don't have enough emergency money, use that to kickstart your emergency money savings. If you have credit card debt that's just lingering around, put that towards the credit card debt. If you haven't started investing at something that's been on your list of things to do, use that $ 1, 000 to start investing. And if you've got debt, put it towards the home loan. Create some breathing space if you want to, or kickstart your financial float, which is what we talk about in our book, to help manage your cash flow so much better and more smoothly. Use that money intentionally. 00:19:22 Speaker 1: It's going to be a busy weekend. Everybody out there now looking for their thousand dollars in their house. 00:19:27 Speaker 2: Now, I have to admit something. You know how you just asked me how do you avoid not repeating history and going back to the shops and replacing all of those things you just decluttered with? 00:19:37 Speaker 1: You bought more water skis. 00:19:40 Speaker 2: No. So if you really wanted to do the work, the deep work, the uncomfortable work, you could actually sit down and add up the cost of everything that you're selling, the total cost, and take a moment to acknowledge how much money you'd actually wasted. 00:20:02 Speaker 1: Oh. 00:20:03 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:20:04 Speaker 1: I didn't want to say it, but I was like, actually. It feels like that would just, it's a source of regret. It's cruel. 00:20:10 Speaker 2: Yes, massively, but we've got to be responsible here and take accountability here. 00:20:16 Speaker 1: Yeah. And if anything, then that you use that then as a source of motivation to not repeat the same mistakes. Yeah. Okay. 00:20:23 Speaker 2: I'm being cruel to be kind here, but it would be wrong of me not to share this idea if someone really felt like they needed to do it. 00:20:31 Speaker 1: Do you reckon a thousand bucks? I reckon I want to give this a go this weekend. 00:20:37 Speaker 2: Should we do a challenge? 00:20:38 Speaker 1: Yes, let's do it. I reckon we can do this, $ 1, 000 in the course of one weekend. It's a lot. I'm going to clean out so much stuff. 00:20:46 Speaker 2: Hang on. We're putting too much pressure on ourselves. We shouldn't be trying to– because sometimes these things take a while to sell. I think we should have a challenge to try and list $ 1, 000 worth of stuff or maybe $ 1, 500 worth of stuff to allow people that may bargain us down. 00:21:03 Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. 00:21:04 Speaker 2: Because some things you need, once you've posted, you've kind of done your job, you can kind of let it be and do its thing. 00:21:09 Speaker 1: The rest is just messaging back and forth. 00:21:10 Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, okay. All right. You shouldn't put a pressure of it. Well, we can, but. 00:21:15 Speaker 1: But let's try and list $ 1, 000. Yes. Okay. $ 1, 000 worth of stuff. All right. Okay. 00:21:20 Speaker 2: Game on. 00:21:21 Speaker 1: I'm going to be selling all my surplus shovels. I've got plenty, apparently. All right, if we want to find out more from you, if we want to see how your challenge is going, where do we find you? 00:21:32 Speaker 2: Best place is always to reach out to me on Instagram at SugarMamaTV. 00:21:35 Speaker 1: And you can hear me every day with Sean Aylmer on Fear and Greed, business news you can use. Thank you for listening to How Do They Afford That? Remember to hit follow on the podcast. That part is crucial. Hit that little follow button. As always, very much appreciated. And tell somebody else about the podcast. Help us spread the word. Thanks for your company. Join us again next week. Bye.