Thursday, June 26, 2014

GARAGE SALE!!! DEBT SNOWBALL UPDATE!!!!

Last week was it!  We finally had a garage sale!  I think Zach and I moved boxes labeled “garage sale” to three different houses.  Well, that stuff is out, and it is out for good!  Our biggest category by far was baby stuff.  Tu grows like a weed, so we had clothes up to 12 months and all her little baby stuff (*tear).  Out with the old, in with the…well, I guess the new us!  We’re using all the proceeds to get out of debt, not buy stuff to replace the stuff we sold.  We already sold some larger items (see our post from May 8th), but I had no desire to take picture after picture of all of the outfits Turner has outgrown.  While we know things don’t always go to plan, Zach and I aren’t planning on having any more babies for quite a while.  By then, even if we had another girl, all the stuff would be super outdated.  Some concerns over us selling as much as possible have been brought to my attention.  Right now, the best thing we can do, not only for Turner but our future children as well, is get out of debt.




Prep:  My family used to have a HUGE garage sale at my Mamaw’s (that’s Southern for “Grandma”) house every year.  I don’t think any of us are particularly sentimental about our stuff, so we had no shortage of things to sell.  My mom let me keep the money from my sales which I would promptly spend at either our saleor others in the neighborhood.  I remember them fondly.  


  Fast-forward 15 years later, and now I actually have to go through the stuff and decide what to get rid of.  I usually purge clothes about once a year (if I didn’t wear it in a year, I probably don’t need it), and I went on a mad spree after Tu was born.  I never wanted to see maternity clothes again! Poof, gone. Tu’sstuff is easier, because it doesn’t fit her, so she has zero use for it.  I saved a couple special pieces (the outfit she came home in, some shoes) and the rest is out of our lives!  Zach did a great job of going through alllllll his books (trust me, all those “l”s are necessary). Together, we had one part of a multi-family sale!


  Advertising is key in having a good turnout.  Our local, free newspaper has a garage sale section that’s updated every week.  We’ve gone to that section to find sale before, and we’re sure we’re not the only ones.  Mama bought an ad to run the week before and the week of the sale.  She also put up colorful signs not only on her street (where it intersects the main street and a guiding sign a little further down) but also at Kroger and Walmart.  Zach and I posted on Facebook about it the morning of the beginning of the sale.  In hindsight, we should have been posting every day that week.  


  The turnout was good on Thursday, okay on Friday, and virtually non-existent on Saturday.  We couldn’t believe it.  Then we drove up the street.  Someone had taken down our signs at the intersection and halfway down the road.  We were bummed.  Of course, we didn’t discover this until the sale was over.

We made $112 dollars.  We were hoping for closer to $200, butit’s $112 we didn’t have before!  We took all the baby stuff that didn’t sell to the Crisis Nursery.  It is a fantastic charity that offers free daycare and services to mothers that are out of options.  They offer everything donated for free to these women. I volunteered there in junior high, and it was an amazing experience.  They were super grateful and even showed us around the facility!  I couldn’t be happier with our choice to donate to them. Don’t live in the Peoria area?  They have locations nationwide!  Google it!


  We had a furniture piece that didn’t sell, and my cousin took it for their Alzheimer’s Benefit auction that they throw every year.  She actually donated all of her sales to the Alzheimer’s Foundation.  We can’t wait to do that someday when we’re out of debt.

So, it did not go as well as we hoped.  Things we learned:

Post on Facebook till people block you because you’re so annoying.
Location, location, location isn’t just for selling real estate. Have garage sales in a visible place.  Exception: a neighborhood sale.
Make sure you have a lot/most of the stuff sitting out in the driveway/on the sidewalk.  There’s something a little creepy about going in someone’s dark garage.

  Mama and my Aunt Diana did a great job of keeping the sale organized, and Mama is great with haggling.  We had our best people on the job, and we just didn’t get the traffic we expected.  But, I guess now we know!

  Zach is listing books and DVDs we didn’t sell.  Look for a post on that soon!

 

DEBT SNOWBALL UPDATE!!!

Turner is officially paid off!!!  In other words, my hospital bill from Tu being born is paid in full!  We have moved on to my smallest student loan.  We started attacking it about a week and a half ago, and it has gone from over $900 down under $500!  Woo!  It’s happening!

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