Mighty Bargain Hunter

Yard sale shopping with my daughter

June 29th, 2008 | by mbhunter |

My wife was at a quilting bee today so I got to spend the day with my three-year-old daughter. After we went to a park near the Potomac River we stopped at a community yard sale in one of the bigger subdivisions nearby.

It’s a lot easier to say “yes” when we’re “shopping” at yard sales. Maybe this is weak parenting but I don’t think it’s a bad thing to encourage or reinforce that you can get more for your money (or more for my money) at yard sales than in other stores. I only rarely splurge in retail stores but often splurge at yard sales.

Here’s what we got:

• Four basically unworn shirts for my daughter: 25 cents each. She informed me that she didn’t need more shirts but she’ll grow into these. I even managed to find shirts without licensed characters on them.
• Marbled sidewalk chalk: 25 cents for a package of four. This was pretty cool-looking sidewalk chalk.
• Blade-type scooter: $1. Ok, this one had Barbie on it but my wife said that this wasn’t quite as bad as wearing Barbie.
• Seven bouncy balls: a nickel each. Two of them flashed when we bounced them.
• Puppy Racers game for 75 cents. This one’s pretty amusing. It’s vaguely reminiscent of Hungry Hungry Hippos but two dogs “fetch” plastic balls by pushing them with their noses.
• Small craft soap-making kit for a buck.
• A sand art kit for $2.
• A cement mixer for $1. This was one of the better deals. It’s black with a green top on it, and it’s handy for mixing up a small amount of Quikrete. If nothing else we can use it to store rice or something like that.

Have you had any good finds at yard sales recently?

Questions tagged credit-card at Cash Commons:

• When entering credit card information on a website, does the billing address have to be correct?
• Anybody have sucesss with 0% Balance Transfers on Credit Cards?
• Two of my credit cards got hit with fraudulent charges the same day. What gives?