One of the best things about the internet is that you can buy and sell practically anything on the web. You can find a buyer for anything whether it’s the vision of Virgin Mary on your toast or it’s a piece of America’s excess. A lot of sites will show you a list of things that have sold and point out how ridiculous it is. This list isn’t that.

This is a list of things that you might have sitting in your house that you can sell for money.

1. Company Schwag

When Lehman Brothers tanked a couple weeks back, employees were royally screwed. It wasn’t hyperbole to say that the stock wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on because all manner of Lehman schwag was up for sale on eBay. Lehman’s not alone, you can find awesome reminders of this year’s financial collapse on eBay:

• Merrill Lynch
• Washington Mutual
• IndyMac

Funny thing is that we went through this once before in the dot-com bust, where the most valuable asset a company had was the box of t-shirts stuck in the corner of its closet. There’s always a buyer for company schwag.

2. ADT Lawn Signs & Window Stickers

Some people love security systems, some people hate them. The ones who love them say it keeps them save, the ones who hate them say the false alarms consume valuable police resources that otherwise would be out fighting crime. Either way, one thing is for certain, crooks will break into a home without an ADT lawn sign before they will break into one with the sign. (It’s like The Club for cars, it’s as much a visual deterrent as it is an actual anti-theft device!)

As you might imagine, the signs themselves have value and you can buy them on ebay! (and obviously you can sell them too)

3. Copper

A few weeks back, we replaced our dishwasher and managed to crimp the copper pipe that connected the water source to the new dishwasher. Once you crimp a copper pipe, it’s pretty much game over for the pipe. I replaced it with a flexible hose from Home Depot but now I have a copper pipe sitting around with absolutely no use for it. Solution? Sell it.

In fact, if you remember the news a few months back, there was a whole rash of copper thefts all over as commodities prices were soaring. People were breaking into homes to steal copper to sell. Just go into Google and look for metal scrap recyclers in your area. You might not get a lot but, in my case, it sure beats taking up space in my basement.

4. Geo Metro

With soaring fuel prices, Geo Metros are coming back in style with their great gas mileage. Don’t believe me? CNN did a story and The Consumerist broke it down nice and easy for us. The stats on a 1992 Geo Metro XFi is comaprable to a 2008 Toyota Prius, except the Geo Metro costs only $7000 versus the $21k+ Prius. Have one of these sitting around?

5. Nintendo Systems (and Games)

Have a Nintendo or Super Nintendo? How about the Sega Genesis? There’s a whole generation of video gamers looking back at their childhood and remembering the years of Tecmo Bowl, Megaman and Altered Beast. That generation is now working and willing to pay a premium just to get the game systems (Nintendo NES? Super Nintendo? Genesis?) so they can play the games as they once did, so many years ago. Selling it won’t make you rich but it’s probably worth more than you expected!

6. Ugly 80’s Vintage Dresses

My wife told me about this one at dinner the other day but apparently ugly 80’s vintage dresses are all the rage nowadays. People are having old prom-theme parties, trying to out do one another in terms of the ridiculousness of their dress. I tried to find some verification of this but it was difficult. Apparently between the old ugly prom dresses and the downright criminal bridesmaid dresses, there is a little niche market for those. Fashion goes in cycles right?

7. Really Old Expired Credit Cards

Yep, you can actually sell really old credit cards as they’ve become collectibles! Don’t believe me? Check out these eBay auctions for some gems. I’m not entirely sure why they’re popular or if there’s a true market for it (other than people wanting to get some old schwag) but if you have some old cards, you could scrape up a few dollars for it.

And of course…

8. Worn Underwear

Yep… you can buy worn underwear. Gross.

Recently I’ve been doing some cleaning around the house and thinking about how to unload some of the stuff we’ve acquired over the years. I have a ton of junk that’s just taking up space in closets, on bookshelves, in basement rooms, etc. Fortunately, with the power of the Internets, it’s actually quite easy to sell the stuff you don’t need. Here are my favorites:

Textbooks

Everyone knows the school store is the worst place to sell a textbook but there are easier and better alternatives. First, I’d check the bulletin boards of your school, both online and offline. By selling it through the bulletin boards you save on shipping and selling fees. My online favorites are Amazon.com and half.com because you can list in minutes once you setup a Marketplace account. Then, you can enter the ISBN number (the numbers underneath the bar code), product quality, sale price and Amazon will set up the rest for you. For the convenience you do pay a price, Amazon.com takes a 15% commission on the sale price, so try offline first.

“Commodity” Goods

I’ve always said that eBay is the prime place for anything that can be considered a commodity. A commodity is a DVD, watches, a car part, or any number of items in which one of them is is essentially interchangeable with another. What you get with one particular I Am Legend DVD is going to essentially be the same as any other, minus different scratches and the like. For items like that, eBay is king. eBay is king because they have useful tools to help in the listing process of commodity goods and because you get access to a huge buying community. Commodity goods also ship well, which means that geography isn’t a liability as it is with furniture.

Clothes

Used clothes are always difficult to sell but if it’s a particularly unique piece then you can always try local consignment shops. If it’s a suit, consider snapping a few photos, getting the dimensions, and listing it on eBay. In college my friend used to buy suits from Goodwills in affluent neighborhoods and sell them on eBay for a tidy profit, so it’s certainly possible. In general though you’ll probably get a better return donating them and taking the tax deduction.

Furniture & Other Large Items

Craigslist baby. Furniture (and other large items) is often big, difficult to ship and transport, so you’ll want to keep the buyer in the same geographic area. eBay isn’t a good option since shipping will make something too expensive. You can often find a major city Craigslist site near you but expect a lot of false positives. I recently gave away a dishwasher and had many false positives (and it was for free!). If you do have a weaker piece of furniture or a larger item that you don’t think you can sell and you don’t think Goodwill/Salvation Army will accept as a donation, giving it away on Craigslist is a good alternative to the dump or recycling facility. (large items can include basically anything heavy like tools, appliances, etc.)

There you go, four major clutter categories and the places you can unload the loot you’ve acquired all those years.

(Photo by seandreilinger)

When Patrick at Cash Money Life tagged me for this meme, he said that I probably had a couple little “hustles” going on the side when I was in college. I have no idea how he knew, though I had hinted about them in the past (selling stuff on ebay, online poker and blackjack), I don’t think I ever really wrote them all out in their full glory. I had some pretty lucrative things going, in college student terms, and it certainly easily sustained my lifestyle. However, the number one best financial move in college made the rest pale in comparison.

The number one best financial move I did in college was to graduate a semester early. That one move alone saved the cost of one semester’s tuition at Carnegie Mellon University, located in Pittsburgh, PA; which amounted to somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 plus room, board, food, whatever. I was able to do that because I always loaded myself up with classes, with AP classes in high school and then regular classes in college, and always pushed myself to the limit for those three and a half years. I don’t think all my little side projects, in total, earned close to that.

Of course, that financial move isn’t at all interesting and is borderline boasting (”oh look how smart Jim is!” we won’t go into what my grades were, shhhh!), so let me tell you about the most interesting of the side jobs I had:

Selling on eBay: eBay had started to get big and the whole “Buy Hot Deals from Fatwallet and resell on eBay” was still in its nascent stages. Whenever I see someone trying to make money, I try to figure out how that person is making money and then try to do it and then improve on it. So I saw these great deals on eBay for brand new products and so I investigated where they must be getting these great deals. Some were getting them wholesale (I didn’t want to get a tax ID and go through that process so I skipped it) but some were just buying stuff that was cheaper after rebate and then selling it on eBay. I did that a couple times before I realized the effort wasn’t worth it.

Eventually, I realized that what you needed to do was find products on sale where the eventual buyer wouldn’t be searching the Fatwallet forums or other deal sites. Computer and electronics shoppers are savvy enough to search the forums for a deal so eBay margins on those items is much lower. If you want DVDs, hats, and sports jerseys… those shoppers go to eBay first. Over the course of a year or so I sold maybe a eighty Michael Jordan Wizards jerseys, fifty John Deere hats (this was after Ashton Kutcher made them popular on Punk’d), and who knows how many DVD sets (my fiancee likes telling the story about how we ripped open a package from Canada of Band of Brother Gift Sets and then shoving them into packages for the post office because I was late on shipping them).

Eventually it got to the point where I was tired of looking at the eBay completed sale pages to try to figure out how much something could sell for and I put that Carnegie Mellon Computer Science education to good use. It took a few hours but I put together a Java application that went onto the eBay website and screen scraped the text off the completed auction pages. It collected the last two hundred auctions and then ran some simple statistic numbers. It told me percentage sold, average sale price, standard deviation, range, and who knows what else. I just wanted to know, in a few seconds, whether I could make money with a deal. It eventually started collecting the names of bidders, repeat bidders, losing bidders, and other information that would tell me how many people out there still want this stuff. So if someone was a losing bidder many times, I know at least one person is going to probably want this.

I actually sold the tool, after converting it from a Java app with a GUI to strictly command line, to a PhD candidate friend of a friend for $500, the first, and only, time I had sold a piece of software for money. It was pretty cool! Now eBay’s systems make the tool useless as they now require login, sanitize much of the bidder information, and otherwise make data collection difficult for people who don’t use their API. It was still a ton of fun though and I learned quite a bit from doing it.

So there you have it, both the smartest and the most interesting financial move I made in college. The smartest overall move, of course, was meeting my lovely wife!

When I heard that two enterprising sisters were had sold a cornflake shaped like the state of Illinois, I was curious about some of the other crazy foods people have sold. The first that popped into my mind was the infamous piece of toast with the face of the Virgin Mary, purchased by Canadian-run, Antigua-based GoldenPalace.com Casino in 2004, but there are many many others (GoldenPalace has bought a ton of them). The requirements in order to make the list are only that it’s an “original,” so not a spinoff of an existing idea unless a significant amount of time has passed, and it had to have sold for a relatively significant amount. What’s significant when a cornflake costs a fraction of a cent? Well in that case, $1,350 is.

So, if you’re looking for some ideas as to how to make a few extra bucks, hopefully this list will provide some inspiration! And a word of advice, eBay forbids the selling of food (probably for good reason) but you can get around that by selling a coupon for food or billing it as something else other than “food.” (calling it ‘not for consumption’ or an ‘artifact’ or whatever)

Virgin Mary Toast: $28k

Probably the most publicized eBay auction for a piece of food was this little gem sold by Diane Duyser of Florida in 2004 for $28,000 to GoldenPalace.com. Duyser claimed she made the sandwich in 1994, saw what appeared to be the face of the Virgin Mary, and then kept it around in a plastic case! Not surprisingly, she then said it gave her good luck, including winning $70,000 at a casino in Florida (are there casinos in Florida?). Burn some toast until you get a famous face, then call up GoldenPalace.com because buying crazy stuff on eBay has become one of their primary advertising and marketing strategies. [BBC]

k-Fed Egg-Salad Sandwich & Corn Dog: $520

GoldenPalace has bought a lot of other ridiculous food and this time it was a vacuum-sealed half-eaten egg-salad sandwich and corn dog dinner. [PRNewswire]

Jesus Shaped Fish Sticks: $79

Victoria Landis of Elyria, Ohio, sold fish sticks fused together “in a way that made three mini crosses, and the way they fell on the pan it looked just like the hill where Jesus was crucified.” She managed to get score $79, which included next-day shipping in dry ice, for her discovery. Unfortunately no picture exists and not much more information is available on the sale. [UPI, Clevescene]

Illinois-shaped Cornflake

The most recent entry into the group comes from Melissa and Emily McIntire of Virginia. They sold a cornflake shaped like Illinois to Monty Kerr of Texas for $1,350 in March 2008. Money Kerr runs TriviaMania.com and wanted to add it to a traveling museum… or just trying to get some affordable advertising by way of crazy eBay auctions! This isn’t the first time Kerr tried to buy a cornflake, he bought “world’s largest” in the past but it broke! So he was left with three pretty big cornflakes, poor guy. [CNN]

I’ve owned an XBox 360 for nearly a year and I’ve never once purchased anything in the XBox Live Marketplace because there was never anything I really wanted - until I bought Rock Band. With the music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, the producers are releasing new songs via the XBox Live Marketplace and, if my memory serves me right, Rock Band songs cost 160 Microsoft Points a piece (they also bundle them in packs of 3 for 440 MS Points).

The math on how much a Microsoft Point is worth in the retail market works out to be 1.25 cents per point in the US, with prices slightly higher abroad (not on purpose there, it’s just exchange rates). You can get them slightly cheaper elsewhere and so you never want to pay retail price for points. There is always a cheaper alternative, unless you absolutely have to have points right now.

My goal is to pay, at most, a penny per point, and often times you can get them for even less if you’re willing to look.

Amazon.com

Amazon sells two point valued cards, a 1600 and a 4000 point card. The 1600 Microsoft Points Card is currently going for $18.99, making it 1.1869 cents/point, and the 4000 Microsoft Points Card is going for $47.99, making it 1.1998 cents/point. Yes, right now the 1600 point card is better than the 4000 point card (go figure). However, with a penny per point being our benchmark, Amazon.com doesn’t cut it in this case. Also, Amazon.com has to mail you the card so there’s a shipping delay between when you buy and when you can use the points. The card itself is meaningless, all you need is the code on the back… therein lies options #2.

eBay

I love eBay for these types of commodity goods and eBay has a ton of listings of Microsoft Points. You have your typical 1600 pointers for $17.99, 1.124 cents/point, and the 4000 price varies in the high $40 range, which puts it in line with Amazon.com prices. However, if you’re willing to do a little extra work, look for the 200 point cards that come bundled with some random game. Specifically, look the for the 200 pointer bundled with Robotron 2084 and you’ll see a whole bunch of them for 99 cents - that’s a whopping half cent per point (plus Robotron 2084). The downside is that you have to enter all those codes, not a big deal if you have a keyboard but infuriating if you’re typing them in by hand (plus the downside of buying from a stranger on eBay, so do your due diligence). The upside is that the seller will often email you the code and you can get it immediately.

Stores (with Coupons)

Lastly, your final option is to go to a store like Best Buy, Circuit City, etc. armed with a coupon that lets you take dollars off your purchase. If you happen to be buying something else, throwing on some Microsoft Points at retail value so you are eligible to use a coupon might be a good idea. Short of that, going to a retail store without a coupon is the absolute worst thing you can do because you pay for gas, pay for tax, and you pay full price. Yuck.

There you have it, my brief guide on where to get the best prices on points. I’m not a seasoned point buyer so if anyone else has some good tips, please let me know so I can feed my Rock Band addiction on the cheap! Thanks!

About to start comparison shopping for a new digital camera? How about a new memory card for an old digital camera? Well, whatever you’re looking for, the best way to find the average price something is going for is to check the completed sales lists on eBay. eBay is a better gauge of prices than comparison shopping engines like PriceGrabber because you can typically find better prices on eBay for the exact same products because those sellers have less overhead and are typically extreme bargain hunters, able to get low prices though creative use of coupons and promotions. Remember though, only look at the Completed Listings (and filter out on price to filter out accessories) and be sure to account for any accessories the seller is throwing in.

Let’s take an example, if you look at the completed listings for the CASIO EXILIM EX-Z70 that have an end price over $50 (to cut out accessories), you’ll see that the CASIO EXILIM EX-Z70 plus a 1GB memory card will cost you around $200 (including shipping); no memory card and the price drops about $10-$20 less. If you try PriceGrabber, the CASIO EXILIM EX-Z70 isn’t even listed! If you check Amazon, the CASIO EXILIM EX-Z70 goes for about $250… so, the moral is that eBay is a good price benchmark if you want some quick and dirty information.

One of the biggest scams in education, besides shelling out thirty grand a year for a private university (just kidding Mom and Dad!), is the college bookstore. They sell textbooks at full price and then, at the end of the year, offer to buy back that textbook at a fraction of the price. Buy a copy of Machine Learning, new, for $153.44 and then they’ll offer to buy it back for around $20 at the end of the semester! It’s a racket!

What you should do instead is buy a used copy of Machine Learning for a 79.99 and tell the university bookstore to go screw themselves and their monstrous profit margins.

Some people have reservations about buying textbooks online because they don’t like the idea of buying something sight unseen. I share those reservations if the item is something that’s thousands of dollars (I did buy two cars on eBay, so maybe I don’t share it quite so much) but we’re talking a savings of 50% on something as dull as a textbook. However, given those reservations, here are a few tips I have for buying textbooks online.

1. Read seller’s feedback - There are a number of sellers who are businesses selling used textbooks, one example is “ecampus_com” on Amazon who has over 69,568 ratings (86% positive). Go with these larger sellers (some are often stores or other websites using the Amazon Marketplace to unload inventory. I find that feedback through Amazon’s system is much more accurate than on Ebay because the buyers aren’t afraid of retaliation if the transaction goes sour (eBay recently changed this but the historical records still remain under the old system).
2. Use a reputable site with a strong mediation program - If the book doesn’t come, you want to make sure the website handles the problem. I’ve had people on Amazon not ship a book. I reported that the book never arrived, received a refund, and bought another one from someone else. It’s harder to do that on Ebay, Amazon requires only a simple explanation and a few mouse clicks. (which I suppose is bad for sellers, but whatever)
3. Buy a book at the bookstore, return it when the cheaper one arrives - If your bookstore has a liberal return policy, allowing you to keep the book for a few weeks, take advantage of it. Most stores offer liberal return periods because many students don’t drop a class until they’ve tanked the first test, bookstores are very understanding in this way.
4. Use a credit card - Instead of a debit card for your online transaction, use a credit card. If you’re balance is close to $0, having a textbook’s charge sitting in limbo limits your financial flexibility. Don’t put yourself in that situation.
5. At least buy from an online bookstore - While Machine Learning is an awful example because Amazon offers no discount on the retail price, at least look online to see if their prices are cheaper. Use resources like AddAll, a textbook search engine, to find the best price.
6. Don’t buy it online, buy it from another student - Rather than buy the textbook from a website, hit up your school’s bulletin boards or For Sale message boards to see if someone is selling that book on the cheap. You can often save on shipping charges and even get yourself a better deal. Remember, the seller is trying to get more than $20 for the book and you’re trying to pay less than $200, a happy medium can be found somewhere in there.

There you go, my tips for buying textbooks (or any book) online.

(Photo by larissa72350)

I used to sell stuff on eBay (from Wash. Wizards Jordan jerseys to Anime DVDs) and had my process down to a pretty good science so that wasted activity was put to the absolute minimum. One of the key things I did was to use a standardized auction template that included all my shipping information and payment information so that prospective buyers wouldn’t ask me any needless questions. The key to a good boilerplate terms & conditions is that it’s description but not so large and cumbersome that buyers gloss over it. After the jump you’ll see my template (and it’s associated code).

First off, ignore the colors, they look much better in eBay.

Second, the key pieces of information in your template are Shipping & Handling information, your shipping policy, your accepted payment methods, and any other conditions you want to list (preferably in that order). You’ll find all those bits addressed below and in the years of selling since using this template I have yet to receive an email about an auction not related to the actual item for sale.

Oh, and don’t forget to thank your prospective buyers for stopping by!

[Download as .txt file]

Do not depend on the eBay Buyer Vehicle Protection Program. It’s not that I don’t believe eBay will protect you, they have a vested financial interest in doing so, it’s that there are a lot of variables and a lot of things that can go wrong. In fact, whenever you buy anything, the protection policies should never come into play because you should only enter into a transaction that you are 100% confident in. If there is a inkling of foul play, don’t buy the car. If the guy sounds funny or is not entirely forthcoming when you ask a question, don’t buy the car. If you’re on the fence about the vehicle, for whatever reason, do not buy the car.

Vehicle Purchase Protection
Ensures that you receive the vehicle you paid for, with coverage up to $20,000 against fraud or material misrepresentation.

That’s the guarantee that eBay provides, with a $100 deductible. But if you look closely, it only protects you if the seller commits fraud or misrepresents the vehicle. A lot of times, the listing will state “As-Is” and so that absolves the seller of any problems that he or she didn’t know about beforehand.

Let’s say you purchase a car and it has a huge scratch that the seller didn’t mention. Well, that’s something that the seller can’t pretend to not have known about. But what if the problem is a small leak in the coolant line that ruptures, causes your car to overheat, and you blow a head gasket? Well, that small leak isn’t something that the seller would necessarily know about, especially if the leak was small and grew over time. The repairs to your car would be in the thousands of dollars but you can’t hold the seller liable because he or she didn’t know.

So, bottom line, if you would buy the car without the protection program, buy the car. If you see a car that you would only buy if you had eBay’s protection program, skip it. Do yourself a favor and skip it. No money is worth the headaches that a potential “mysterious” problem would bring.

I’ll let you in on a little known secret about the relationship between the Buy It Now and Reserve Prices for eBay Motors auctions, the Reserve Price is usually around $500-$1000 under the Buy It Now price, based on empirical evidence. You can safely ignore the current price because most cars worth anything will not be listed without a reserve price (there are exceptions of course) and so unless the reserve has been met, it won’t be sold.

If you see that the Buy It Now for the car is more than a grand over what you want to pay for it, chances are you won’t be able to get the car for that price this time around. My suggestion? Watch the auction, if it doesn’t sell then the seller will likely drop the Buy It Now price a few hundred bucks and relist. You may even want to call him up and ask him how much he is looking to get for the car and, if you’ve done your homework, may be able to suggest to him that the price he is waiting for is a little too high given your research. Unless you are low-balling the seller, he or she will likely hear what you have to say and may be willing to sell it to you outright.

Remember, if you buy it off eBay, you have no protection from eBay.