Aside from that here are a few interesting links:

• Tom over at Canadian Finance Blog launched a personal finance aggregator / portal called MoneyIndex.org and it’s loaded up with a nicely-categorized collection of feeds from the broad areas of money and finance.  The site is responsive and clean.  Give it a check-out!
• Len Penzo explains a simple test for deciding whether it’s better to buy or rent a house.
• No Credit Needed compiled a nice list of personal finance resources.
• Sweating the Big Stuff boils down prioritizing earning and saving to two simple instructions.
• Consumerism Commentary asks how much you should spend on your hobbies.
• Blonde and Balanced has a personal movie rating system that helps her to decide how much to spend.
• Budgeting in the Fun Stuff has a guest post from Financially Poor on whether recycling is good for your pocketbook.
• Bucksome Boomer lists seven ways to conserve water at home.

Bargain on!

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Amongst a bunch of other things we had demanding our attention, we got the ending time of the sale wrong.  We had thought that we would have an hour or so at the sale, but we arrived there about 15 minutes before the end.  The sellers were already starting to pack up their stuff.

We were a tad disappointed, but there are a few good things about hitting a yard sale at the very end:

• It forces efficiency. We didn’t have a lot of time, but we didn’t have a lot of time to waste, either.  Saving money is great, but depending on the situation, saving time is more important.  The added need for focus helped us to act quickly, and the “priority items” jumped out a little more at us, like a closet organizer and a couple of shelving units.
• It reduces the likelihood that we’ll buy a lot of junk we don’t need. Because, that’s SO out.  We’ve been there and done that and have boxes full of T-shirts to prove it.  Fifteen minutes doesn’t gives a lot of time for collecting junk.
• Most importantly, though, the deals can be pretty good! A lot of the stuff is gone, but what’s left can go for fire-sale prices.  Why?  Because it was a blistering hot day, the sellers were tired, they were almost done with their sale, and then they got to … pack and lift everything that they didn’t sell back into their vans and trucks, and then take it to a donation station or the dump, or unload it back into their garage.  Yahoo … NOT!  We found that we could get really fantastic deals on stuff.  And the heavier the stuff was, the better deal we got on it!  Amazing how that works, no?

So, this weekend we got less yard-saling in than we thought we were going to, but it wasn’t all bad.

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Auctions and yard sales used to be a weakness of mine.  I’d go stark-raving crazy buying up all of these bargains for (a) things I had an immediate use for, (b) things I didn’t have an immediate use for, but were such a good deal, and (c) things I had no need for, but thought I could resell.  Some of the things in (b) and (c) I actually did use/resell, but a lot of it I didn’t, and I ended up either getting rid of it, or storing (and moving) it.

I’ve finally internalized some restraint (and I think my wife has too a bit).  Cases in point:

• At a furniture store liquidation auction a couple of weeks ago, my wife went there and spent all of $9.  She got two chairs for $2.50 apiece that matched exactly the dining room set we bought from there shortly after we were married, and got another chair for $4 that complements our foyer.  Three highly useful, highly manageable things — as opposed to boxes and boxes of junk that we bid on just because we could get them all for $2.
• At a yard sale just this past weekend I bought a set of computer speakers (after finally realizing that the ones that came with my last computer were absolute garbage and probably never worked).  I passed up a whole lot of other stuff, including boxes of computer cabling that would have been useful (maybe) but until then would just sit in a pile.  (I’ve bought boxes of wires before, and they just sat there.  In fact, we just got rid of some of ours!)  I also passed up a pressure washer that, although the guy was offering it for $5, had a broken pump.  It just wasn’t worth the risk to try to fix it.

Decluttering can be very satisfying, and even financially rewarding.  A corollary to this is that accumulating stuff is overrated, even at rock-bottom prices. Bargains are great, but too many bargains is too much of a good thing, especially when they’re cramping your house.

I think this has finally sunk in, and frankly not a moment too soon, because we now live in a larger house with quite a bit of extra space tempting us.

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One piece of advice he gives to people who’ve dug themselves into a deep hole is to sell off a lot of the stuff that got them into the hole in the first place using yard sales, Craigslist, eBay, whatever — especially if it’s gotten so bad that the mortgage payments are behind.  Some of the big things may have to go, like “the flat-screen TV, boat, or Harley.”  Depending on how imminent the consequences are, some really tough decisions may need to be made.

But taking a different spin on this, it could also work to sell a lot of little stuff — whether it be shoes, DVDs, Hummel figurines, books, salt and pepper shakers, comic books, whatever.  Stuff that might have brought some pleasure at one time, but now just takes up space.  Or maybe it still brings pleasure, but needs to go to because bills are due.  A nice collection of DVDs can be sold as a lot on eBay for a few hundred dollars (or more).

If the stuff is more of the “now just takes up space” kind, then there’s a nice fringe benefit:  having that stuff gone literally frees up some of your brain power.  We moved recently and I didn’t do as good a job pitching things before I moved.  I got rid of several boxes of books and magazines that weren’t doing anything productive.  (At one point I was going to sell them, but that’s starting to fall through.)  My shoulders felt lighter after doing that, and it was one less thing I had gnawing at me and sapping my mental energy.

Selling stuff is a great way to raise cash to pay off bills and reduce debt.  Some of the prized possessions may (painfully) end up going, but try starting with the low-hanging fruit — stuff that doesn’t really do that much anymore — and enjoy the extra space and extra piece of mind along with the extra cash.

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This past weekend there was a yard sale that was initially advertised for Friday and Saturday.  The folks taped over the sign the next day: “Sun.”  So we stopped by there after church, and bought a couple of things.  I recognized some of the collectible plates they had as being at the previous day’s flea market.

On my way to work yesterday, they had replaced the taped-over sign: “Mon.”

This morning: “Tue.”

That’s not normal, but even more so, there was another yard sale just down the road that also had had their stuff out for five days.

What’s up?

It could be a number of things:

• The weather is getting colder and they’re taking advantage of it before they have to wait until spring to sell their stuff again like this.
• They really like running yard sales. Hey, nothing wrong with that at all!
• They own a business (maybe an eBay business) and they’re trying to unload some inventory at more reasonable prices, without making the buyers pay shipping.
• They are just selling off their stuff because they need to. If it were just to get rid of stuff, there was a thrift store just down the road where they could have dropped it off.  But that’s not what they did.  They tried to sell it, five days in a row.

In any case, these are all great things to do, and I’m not to judge these folks or what they’re trying to do.  If the reason they’re selling their stuff this way is because they need the money, then it’s probably a sign of the times:  People have bought more stuff than they need, with money they didn’t have, and now need the money more than the stuff.

There will be a whole lot of liquidation before the economy turns up again.

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We hit the flea market right at the very end.  I think three of the sellers there gave my daughter something.  One gave her a couple of small toys from the quarter bin.  Another gave her a Beanie-Baby-type snail (we bought $20 worth of stuff from them) and still another let her pick through a box of books and toys for whatever she wanted.  (I knew this person from work.)

I think people were willing to just give their stuff away for a few reasons:

• They wouldn’t have to load it back up into their vehicle if we just took it. It was a little bit hot outside and many of them had already been there four hours, so they wanted to get out of there ASAP.
• They had already decided to give away what they didn’t sell. So why not give it away a little earlier?

The early bird catches the worm but there are plenty of worms for the late birds too, apparently.

Also, a nice aside:  I forgot a box of stuff I had bought at the sale, and the seller had the honesty and presence of mind to take the box into the community center where the sale was.  It was there when I remembered that I had left it there.

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