Wow! $4500 setup. We're just regular Joe's (I better add Jane's too so there's no misunderstanding lol) and we don't have high end stuff either. Thanks for the other ideas.
Gonna have to scratch our head on this one.
Red
-- Edited by el Rojo on Thursday 26th of September 2013 09:45:34 AM
el Rojo and Pam said
01:07 PM Sep 26, 2013
Did anybody use an Estate Sale Company? Our Realtor came yesterday and when we asked about the stuff she said many people were happy with them. They set everything up and priced your items, of course for a fee. I was thinking if things were priced right we would realize more gain with less stuff at the end. I know some of these companies have re-sale shops of there own and might over price things so they can low ball a bid at the end for themselves. We wouldn't use one of these companies.
NWescapee said
03:48 PM Sep 26, 2013
We thought we were going to do a traditional estate sale and changed our mind on that.
Our experience: Traditional estate sale company came in, evaluated what we had and told us we would have to vacate the house for 2 weeks while they staged, priced and conducted the sale. We were okay with that, figuring we could live in our old TT on the driveway while they did that work. However, we were then told that they thought they would raise $6000-7000 in total sales, they had a $4500 minimum fee plus 10% on anything above that. So, if they sold everything for $6000 our fees would have been $5100, profit for us of $900. Just didn't seem worth the hassle of vacating the house for 2 weeks.
We had other estate sale companies who wouldn't even consider us because we didn't have any antiques or super high end furniture or costly collectibles.
Second option, our realtor put us in touch with a local rep from Caring Transitions. She conducted 2 online sales, she had a $200 set up fee and took a 35% commission and we didn't have to leave the house, just be there when people were picking stuff up. We made far more than $900 and it was much lower hassle.
We probably would have gotten rid of more stuff faster with the traditional sale but since we were doing the sale before we had our permanent rig home we would have been renting a storage closet for everything we wanted to take with us since we couldn't leave anything we wanted to keep in the house for the traditional sale which would have also caused us to incur more expense.
We then had one moving sale that was hardly worth the time for us, sold a couple of things on Craigslist, and donated anything that didn't sell that we weren't keeping.
This was just our experience, some people have had a much better experience than we did at a traditional sale. Just wanted to mention that there were other alternatives such as an online estate auction that might work better depending on your circumstances.
NWescapee said
04:01 PM Sep 26, 2013
Red - it doesn't hurt to ask a traditional company, it might be different in your area. We were in the Seattle area and I know you are in Lewisville TX, everything is way more expensive in Seattle so you might have better results in TX than we had.
Trix said
02:56 AM Sep 28, 2013
I just put a few things in storage, sold a few on Craigslist, and donated everything else.
In my experience, garage sales are quite a bit of work for very little gain.
Kyra
Technomadia said
03:58 PM Sep 28, 2013
It all depends on how much time and patience you have available. If your end goal is to just get rid of it and move on, and estate sale could be worth it no matter the price. If you have the time to do it all yourself, you can. It's a lot of work, and in the end you might start thinking $4500 ain't so bad after all :D
After I purged my house, for a while I ran a little side business similar to the Caring Transitions described above, in which I helped folks go through the purge process and get their stuff sold. Even at a 30-35% commission rate, my take home amounted to little more than minimum wage. Which was fine, it was really more of a hobby for me at the time.
- Cherie
Terry and Jo said
07:02 PM Sep 28, 2013
When we were purging ourselves of "stuff," Jo got busy on Craigslist and sold a few items of furniture and sewing equipment. When some of those folks came to pick up the items they wanted, they asked about other items we had. We got lucky in that our neighborhood decided to have a "neighborhood garage sale" and we had to be ready in two weeks for that. The benefit of it being a neighborhood garage sale drew a lot of people to check out each place. While we did sell some of our furniture, overall, we sold over $1500 worth of stuff at garage sale prices. What was left over after the sales, we donated. All the above was after family made their choices to take or buy.
Terry
el Rojo and Pam said
02:37 PM Sep 29, 2013
Looks like we start in Jan for the purge. The DH said she's ready to hit the road. We set a retire date of Feb 28th.
Ckerr said
02:42 PM Sep 29, 2013
I did a combination of things when I downsized.
I sold the more significant items on Craigslist. Be sure to have good pictures! And if you have a truck and can offer delivery in a certain range that helped me get better prices on some of the furniture.
I had a couple of garage sales... PITA, but good for getting rid of little stuff.
I did have a couple of specialty sales to sell the craft and sewing supplies. I set up everything I the dining room, and posted pics on Craigslist to advertise those.
The rest of things I donated to women's shelter that helps women set up households.
There are a lot of options and not one solution is right for everyone. It really depends on the time, energy and resources available.
el Rojo and Pam said
02:58 PM Sep 29, 2013
Thanks everyone for your replies. We only have get rid of a couple items to stage the house for selling. Once we get a contract it will be a mad dash to the end. Sometimes I think we work better this way. In the short time I have been reading this forum, My mind has been letting go of "The STUFF" more and more each day. The dollars we get for the STUFF isn't going to change if or when we head out, it's just a job that has to be done now.
Red
Dcrum said
11:37 PM Oct 8, 2013
I have been selling stuff, and it makes me feel better as we wait for the house to sell in a stagnant local market. At least I'm doing SOMETHING towards the goal. I have been having great success on Facebook yard sale pages. They are local and you often have to "join" the group, but it is SO MUCH EASIER than an actual yard sale. I am getting better prices than a yard sale would have brought, too. Do a search for pages like "Buy, Sell, Swap" or "Yard Sale", etc. Getting onto one will lead you to others. Only trouble is when several people want the item, trying to keep straight who was first! I'm giving away other stuff and have asked the family to claim what they want. It's a process.
WendysPhotos said
02:07 PM Oct 15, 2013
I would check around. Here in Louisville we have the Spring Street Auction house. They hold auctions every Tuesday with Estate stuff , all the way down to boxes of drawer junk. They just charge a 10% of sale last time I looked. You have to bring all the stuff to them for that price, but then they do the rest. It will probably be how we do it. Hire a couple of college kids to help us load it all up and then let them do the rest.
el Rojo and Pam said
02:34 PM Oct 15, 2013
Right now we are in the "remove the clutter mode" to stage the house for marketing in January. It's funny how the transformation or realization in your mind works when you become committed to the full time life style.
All those old cassette tapes from the 70's and 80's in the trash. The western novels.....well they're still in the back of the car. On Sunday we had a neighbor stop to say hello on their way to a flea market to get a buffet. Wait, come inside, we've got just what you need. They bought an antique corner cabinet - YES! I guess what I'm trying to say is my mental hold on "stuff" is losing its grip.
On a after thought, I think I'll call the new RV park in LLano and see if they would like my westerns to start a library.
el Rojo and Pam said
03:44 PM Oct 15, 2013
Wendy, thanks for the ideas on the estate sale.
Update! Since I started this post back in Sept, I have met with a neighbor 5 houses down who with her daughter have 2 garage sales a year. She offered to come down and price everything and help with the sale - for FREE. She said to have two sales a week apart the second one to almost give the stuff away. I guess I'm a real lucky guy.
Update on the western novels... I called Laura at the Riverway RV park in Llano TX. She said they just opened the club house on Oct 1st and had started a library with approx 15 books. I told her more books are on the way. Now I can stop in Llano and read my old books again.
Life is good.
Red
Terry and Jo said
08:42 PM Oct 15, 2013
Red,
While many of your books may remain at the Llano rv park, keep in mind that some RV parks operate their library on a "trade" basis. They allow someone to take a book as long as they leave another book to replace it.
I've donated some books to the RV park that is next to the mobile home park where we live and some of those books have already been "taken."
Terry
el Rojo and Pam said
09:02 PM Oct 15, 2013
Thanks Terry,
Yes I was aware of that, I guess I was being facetious. I'd rather have them available to the RV community than to receive pennies on the dollar for them. They've got a good start on a library now, I think it was over 60 lbs of books.
This is one way I can give back to those who helped me when I started a business.
mylittledogs said
09:16 PM Oct 15, 2013
Hi everyone just reading this post. Just a thought you may be able to donate the western books to a local jail for the inmate to read. Alot of the jails have a library. An most of the books are worn out.
SuzyQ said
06:19 AM Oct 21, 2013
I have been purging the s&b for a couple of months. We donated over 900 books to the Dallas Veteran Hospital. They will give a tax receipt.
Wow! $4500 setup.
We're just regular Joe's (I better add Jane's too so there's no misunderstanding lol) and we don't have high end stuff either. Thanks for the other ideas.
Gonna have to scratch our head on this one.
Red
-- Edited by el Rojo on Thursday 26th of September 2013 09:45:34 AM
Did anybody use an Estate Sale Company? Our Realtor came yesterday and when we asked about the stuff she said many people were happy with them. They set everything up and priced your items, of course for a fee. I was thinking if things were priced right we would realize more gain with less stuff at the end. I know some of these companies have re-sale shops of there own and might over price things so they can low ball a bid at the end for themselves. We wouldn't use one of these companies.
Our experience: Traditional estate sale company came in, evaluated what we had and told us we would have to vacate the house for 2 weeks while they staged, priced and conducted the sale. We were okay with that, figuring we could live in our old TT on the driveway while they did that work. However, we were then told that they thought they would raise $6000-7000 in total sales, they had a $4500 minimum fee plus 10% on anything above that. So, if they sold everything for $6000 our fees would have been $5100, profit for us of $900. Just didn't seem worth the hassle of vacating the house for 2 weeks.
We had other estate sale companies who wouldn't even consider us because we didn't have any antiques or super high end furniture or costly collectibles.
Second option, our realtor put us in touch with a local rep from Caring Transitions. She conducted 2 online sales, she had a $200 set up fee and took a 35% commission and we didn't have to leave the house, just be there when people were picking stuff up. We made far more than $900 and it was much lower hassle.
We probably would have gotten rid of more stuff faster with the traditional sale but since we were doing the sale before we had our permanent rig home we would have been renting a storage closet for everything we wanted to take with us since we couldn't leave anything we wanted to keep in the house for the traditional sale which would have also caused us to incur more expense.
We then had one moving sale that was hardly worth the time for us, sold a couple of things on Craigslist, and donated anything that didn't sell that we weren't keeping.
This was just our experience, some people have had a much better experience than we did at a traditional sale. Just wanted to mention that there were other alternatives such as an online estate auction that might work better depending on your circumstances.
In my experience, garage sales are quite a bit of work for very little gain.
Kyra
After I purged my house, for a while I ran a little side business similar to the Caring Transitions described above, in which I helped folks go through the purge process and get their stuff sold. Even at a 30-35% commission rate, my take home amounted to little more than minimum wage. Which was fine, it was really more of a hobby for me at the time.
- Cherie
When we were purging ourselves of "stuff," Jo got busy on Craigslist and sold a few items of furniture and sewing equipment. When some of those folks came to pick up the items they wanted, they asked about other items we had. We got lucky in that our neighborhood decided to have a "neighborhood garage sale" and we had to be ready in two weeks for that. The benefit of it being a neighborhood garage sale drew a lot of people to check out each place. While we did sell some of our furniture, overall, we sold over $1500 worth of stuff at garage sale prices. What was left over after the sales, we donated. All the above was after family made their choices to take or buy.
Terry
I sold the more significant items on Craigslist. Be sure to have good pictures! And if you have a truck and can offer delivery in a certain range that helped me get better prices on some of the furniture.
I had a couple of garage sales... PITA, but good for getting rid of little stuff.
I did have a couple of specialty sales to sell the craft and sewing supplies. I set up everything I the dining room, and posted pics on Craigslist to advertise those.
The rest of things I donated to women's shelter that helps women set up households.
There are a lot of options and not one solution is right for everyone. It really depends on the time, energy and resources available.
Red
I have been selling stuff, and it makes me feel better as we wait for the house to sell in a stagnant local market. At least I'm doing SOMETHING towards the goal. I have been having great success on Facebook yard sale pages. They are local and you often have to "join" the group, but it is SO MUCH EASIER than an actual yard sale. I am getting better prices than a yard sale would have brought, too. Do a search for pages like "Buy, Sell, Swap" or "Yard Sale", etc. Getting onto one will lead you to others. Only trouble is when several people want the item, trying to keep straight who was first! I'm giving away other stuff and have asked the family to claim what they want. It's a process.
All those old cassette tapes from the 70's and 80's in the trash. The western novels.....well they're still in the back of the car. On Sunday we had a neighbor stop to say hello on their way to a flea market to get a buffet. Wait, come inside, we've got just what you need. They bought an antique corner cabinet - YES! I guess what I'm trying to say is my mental hold on "stuff" is losing its grip.
On a after thought, I think I'll call the new RV park in LLano and see if they would like my westerns to start a library.
Update! Since I started this post back in Sept, I have met with a neighbor 5 houses down who with her daughter have 2 garage sales a year. She offered to come down and price everything and help with the sale - for FREE. She said to have two sales a week apart the second one to almost give the stuff away. I guess I'm a real lucky guy.
Update on the western novels... I called Laura at the Riverway RV park in Llano TX. She said they just opened the club house on Oct 1st and had started a library with approx 15 books. I told her more books are on the way. Now I can stop in Llano and read my old books again.
Life is good.
Red
Red,
While many of your books may remain at the Llano rv park, keep in mind that some RV parks operate their library on a "trade" basis. They allow someone to take a book as long as they leave another book to replace it.
I've donated some books to the RV park that is next to the mobile home park where we live and some of those books have already been "taken."
Terry
Yes I was aware of that, I guess I was being facetious. I'd rather have them available to the RV community than to receive pennies on the dollar for them. They've got a good start on a library now, I think it was over 60 lbs of books.
This is one way I can give back to those who helped me when I started a business.