The Pros and Cons to Having a Yard Sale

Unless you are having an estate sale or selling at least 90% of the furniture you own, it is unlikely that you will make any much money at a yard sale. But I'm not saying not to have one. I love a good bargain. If having a yard sale is the only way you are going to purge twenty years worth of built-up clutter, than do it!

Let us start by taking a look at the numbers. Say for argument's sake that I made a whopping $600 at my last yard sale. Wow! That is a lot of money. I don't make $600 a day writing for Associated Content. I just sat out there (in the hot summer sun) for five hours and racked in the dough as people looking for lost treasures came and relieved me of my junk. That's $120 an hour. Wahoo!

What about the hours it took to gather the junk from around the house? Oh yeah, but it was only fifteen minutes a day. Fifteen minutes a day for the past month is seven and a half hours. So now we're up to twelve and a half hours. So, I still made $48 an hour.

What about the three hours the night before the yard sale when I sorted everything by category and labeled them with price stickers? Fifteen and a half hours. Still that's $38.71 an hour.

And don't forget the hour it took to make a dozen yard sale signs and drive them all over the city and then remove them again at the end of the day. An hour? Only one hour to drive around buying poster board and sharpies and wooden stakes making up the signs and spreading them all over town? Sure. For argument's sake. But it wasn't an hour for my mom and dad when they decided to go the yard sale route last May. In their hometown, they have changed the laws of yard sales. Since they are not on the city council, the only reason my parents know of these changes is the nasty-gram they got two years prior after having an illegal yard sale. But now the laws are even stricter than they were two years before and award you more than a nasty-gram if you don't follow their laws to the letter. You must get property owner's approval before posting a sign. That's not all. They must be freestanding signs preferably with a stake in the yard. If the property owner allows you to fix your sign to a fence, that's okay with the city. But you absolutely must not place a sign on a telephone pole or stop sign. You have to turn in a list to city hall with the addresses and phone numbers of the intended places for the signs. Then when the powers-that-be approve the locations, you have to place the city's approval sticker on the yard sale signs for the previously agreed on places. When your yard sale is over, you must remove the signs before the next day. If you don't follow all these rules, you will be fined, heavily. Add that one hour, that one painful, painful hour, to the previously tallied fifteen and a half hours and you are at sixteen and a half hours. That's $36.36 an hour; still more than I make writing.

Of course, I am tallying all of this assuming you are doing it all by yourself and not taking off work as well. Otherwise, if you have a helper that whole time, you are making about $18.18 an hour-so far.

Don't forget tear-down time. Don't forget the time it's taking you to claim how much you will be donating to your local charity and the time to either call for a pick-up (if you're so lucky) or the time to load it into your car and drive it down there. Or my preferred method, the last hour everything is a quarter. Take it away folks! Just twenty-five cents! Or you could sell everything that fits into a grocery bag for one dollar during the last hour.

All of this is assuming you are making $600 at your yard sale.

Now let's list the pros of having a yard sale.

You have just removed from your home: duplicates of things you never used and never plan on using, records for the record player you sold back in 1990, five dinner plates from an eight serving set, the changing table you used for your youngest child you just sent off to college, the less than aesthetically pleasing cross-stitch sampler Aunt Gertrude made you for your wedding and you've been saving in the back of your closet should she decide to stop by one day and see your place.

You sold all the furniture that didn't match. You have given the yard sale going folks a good deal for their money in turn making their day. You have taught your children how to make change for a five. You have also taught your children about the value of depreciating goods.

All in all, you have $600 in your pocket that you didn't have last week and a clutter-free home. So how about a family trip to Disneyland?