When I was younger my parents would have a garage sale every few years. This helped clear clutter out of our house and get rid of some of mine and my siblings clothes and toys as we got older. This year my wife and I will be having our first garage sale. We’ve been planning on having one for a while now and are excited to unload some old clothes, books, and more.
As we’ve been preparing I thought I’d share a few tips for having a successful garage sale.
1) Check if there is a citywide Garage Sale in your city or town
Our city has a specific day set aside where residents are encouraged to have garage sales. The bonus of this is that there are more people coming in from other cities specifically to shop at the garage sales. Garage sales can be a bit annoying for neighbors with so many cars coming and going, so it has the additional benefit of getting them all over at once versus having them sporadically throughout the Summer.
2) Start Preparing Early On
The last thing you want to do is throw together a garage sale at the last minute. While this may work for some people, I’d prefer to not be up all night labeling clothes and trying to figure out what I’m selling. I hope to have everything ready to go a few days early so that the night before isn’t stressful.
Start going through your closet, garage, storage, etc. pretty early on. It may take a while to actually go through all your stuff, so the earlier you start the better.
3) Ask Friends and Family to Join In
Most people have stuff they’d like to get rid of or sell, but hosting a garage sale can be a lot of work so not everyone is up for it. Consider asking friends and family if they have anything they’d like to sell. Depending on the person and what they are selling consider deciding what you are willing to take. For example, it’s unreasonable for people to drop off a bag of stuff, expect you to label it, set it out during the garage sale, give them 100% of what it sells for, and give them all their unsold items back. Whether you require them to help staff the garage sale, give you a cut of what they make, etc. you should decide early on the “terms” of participating in the garage sale.
The added benefit of having others involved is that you have more stuff to sell. People will sometimes “check out” the garage sale from their car. If it doesn’t look promising (which usually is due to there not being enough stuff to look at) they may not even stop to get out of their car.
4) Use Tables
You are much less likely to sell stuff if people have bend down to look at every single thing you have laid out, but not everyone has extra card tables to line across their driveway. Consider asking friends and family if you can borrow card tables to use for your garage sale. It will make it much easier for buyers to view your items.
5) Use Signs
When I was in college my parents hosted a garage sale and my siblings and I all put out some stuff as well. I had saved my clothes from the past few years instead of donating or throwing them out, so I had quite a few t-shirts, jeans, and sweaters/sweatshirts to sell. I sold almost all of them, which I think is a little unheard of for clothes sold at a garage sale. I think one thing I did that made people stop and look was put a large sign above my table of clothes that said “Men’s Clothing Size Small – Medium.” I also put a sign showing the waist size of the jeans and pants I put out. People didn’t have to check the tags or wonder what size the clothes were.
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Have you hosted a garage sale before? What additional tips would you add to this list?
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I have never actually been to a garage sale, I always see signs for them, but I figure I would spend money on things I probably don’t need. As for hosting one, these tips all look great, perhaps this might be a good way to get rid of lots of our junk.
MonsterPiggyBank I think it would be a GREAT way to get rid of lots of your junk.
citywide sale sounds like fun! We have a flea market once a year in my mother’s town, everyone brings their stuff to a park and it attracts tons of people. I sold a couple of bicycles last year for a really good price. Since they advertise it you don’t have to worry about that part.
RFIndependence Not having to advertise is a huge bonus. Citywide garage sales / flea markets are definitely the way to go.
These are some great tips DC! We’ve never done a garage sale ourselves, we’ve usually gone the route of selling through Craigslist or selling through a consignment sale. We have a bunch of stuff to get rid of this year and have not decided if we’ll go the Garage Sale or Craigslist route.
FrugalRules We’ll do our garage sale and then list stuff on Craigslist that doesn’t sell. Definitely hoping for some decent side cash.
I hate having garage sales, but I love shopping at them =) I agree about having proper signage, otherwise people can’t find your sale.
Holly at ClubThrifty My wife is ALL about shopping at them, and I sometimes even groan when we pass them and she wants to stop : ) I have learned that it’s best to stop and not complain since shopping at them makes her happy
My neighborhood does a large garage sale every year and anyone in the neighborhood can sell their stuff there. It makes it easy and you don’t have to go out and do it yourself.
DebtRoundUp That sounds super convenient. Looks like we are stuck with hosting ours ourselves.
I think these are fantastic tips. I would add – make sure you have something worth selling. We’ve done a couple sales and half the time you sit outside for 2 days and make like $30. That a terrible ROI! The stuff could have been donating and written off the tax bill for that money!
CashCowCouple Haha that’s happened at some of my parent’s sales. We have been saving up stuff for about four years now plus taking donations from people :0 Should have a decent haul. I like my tax write-offs but I like cold hard cash more!
A garage sale was something that my parents always meant to do when we were growing up but never actually got around to. I’ve given some thought to doing it, but with no experience it’s a little daunting. This is helpful though. Thanks!
I am a big fan of garage sales as it is a great way to get some extra cash quickly and get rid of the stuff that you dont need. One thing that I would add is to use bright colored signs and to try and keep the signs the same color. I often miss white signs as they blend in with other types of signs.
deaconhayes Excellent idea! I will have to put some colored signs on the major roads by our house and direct all the traffic to us : )
Thank you for the post. It made it seem more manageable .
Margee Thanks!
I’ve had one in the past and it was a great way to get rid of stuff that is harder to sell in CL. I want to do another one, especially since I’m in a prime location (about 1 block from 3-4 churches) so any Sunday could attract a lot of people. The downside is I do need to combine it with some friends because I don’t have a ton of stuff, and trying to coordinate with friends has been a chore.
Beachbudget Yeah coordinating can suck : ( It would suck too if your friends just dumped all their stuff and expected you to manage the entire garage sale.
We had a garage sale last year, and we really had to plan it out carefully as they only allow garage sales in our community once a year. It really is like preparing a battle plan, putting together a garage sale. I tend to dis-like having garage sales as they feel like more work than they’re worth – but we ended up making several hundred on our last sale, so that helped to bring me around.
Some tips:
You have to think about staging your sale like a retailer and presenting your items in the best possible light.
Making sure everything is tagged and priced well
Advertise your sale on craigslist and other sites and make sure to put up a lot of signs that make it easy to find your sale.
Have your sale on a day that others in your neighborhood are having sales as well.
try selling baked goods, water and soda, we made $30-40 alone on these things.
Make sure to have plenty of change for shoppers
Price items carefully, not too high, but leaving room for negotiation. Garage sale shoppers love getting a deal!
Be friendly, but let people just shop..
moneymatters These are great tips, and I didn’t even think of the baked goods and refreshments idea! I’m praying our city has a lot of houses participating, I know my parent’s city was insane the weekend of garage sales.
I will have to brainstorm how to best present my stuff….I think that’s what sold all my clothes at my parents garage sale. Seriously sold almost all of them, it was pretty ridiculous!
City wide sounds very cool. As you mentioned in one of your comments below, it saves you from having to personally advertise. I don’t think our city has ever hosted one, but individual subdivisions in our city do that and it does draw lot more traffic. The last time I had a garage sale was many years ago when I was getting ready to move from one city to another. We advertised in the local city newspaper and put signs up around the neighbourhood to direct people to our home. The funny thing was that we said we would start at 7 AM because we knew that some people simply love to troll garage sales and go very early. What ended up happening was that people were banging on our front door by 6 AM that morning and the big stuff was gone by 8 AM.
TacklingOurDebt Nice! I think we will have to get everything set up an hour before we are “officially” allowed to sell (can only sell 8am to 6pm). I’m sure the first four hours are key.
To me, advertising your Yard Sale is the biggest key to success. We have hosted several yard sales per year the last few years. Without fail our success is tied to the amount of effort we put into getting the word out that it is actually happening.
ayoungpro Advertising is huge. Someone gave me the suggestion of putting up a Craigslist ad as well, I will definitely be doing that.
Have plenty of singles and quarters for change! Great tips and good luck with your sale. I would also make a plan to donate whatever is left so it doesn’t go back in side.
#3 is a good tip. The bigger the sale and the more stuff you have to sell the better turnout. Also, once people buy one thing, psychologically it’s easier to buy more, so if you can get them to buy the toaster they might buy a few books too.
Some great tips! Garage sales are definitely a lot of work, but done right can actually net a very decent sum of money AND get rid of a lot “junk” to you! :) For me, it’s about the curb appeal of the garage sale. If things look neat and organized, then I automatically assume the items were well cared for. Might not be true, but it’s about perception. Great call on using card tables. I see people who lay out clothes on their driveway, which doesn’t seem very clean.
When we had our garage sale, we advertised on Craigslist. We got a lot of visitors from that ad! It helped that we were able to list a lot of the items that we were selling. As a result, many of the visitors knew exactly what they were looking for when they arrived.
I love the idea to put a huge sign out that says what the clothes sizes are – that would make it a MILLION times easier for my husband to let me pull over and start shopping because we know that what we’re looking for is more likely to be there. Awesome idea. As for advertising in signs as well – I love signs, but there are so many rules against where you can and can’t put them .. annoying I tell ya .. so I love using this website to post my sales and to find ones to shop at – it’s a life saver! Here’s the link: http://www.yardsalesearch.com/?rf=b