I’m pretty sure that recently I talked about how I wasn’t going to start a second Youtube channel. I spoke at length about how I didn’t want to manage separate channels as I had a hard enough time coming up with content consistently for one channel. In this post, I’ll talk about why I had a change of heart and created a second Youtube channel.
Over the past few years, I have gone on at length about trying to earn extra income to support my family. While we aren’t burdened with massive debt, we do have a mortgage I’d like to pay off. That’s due to the fact that we’ve already identified that we need to build a second house.
Our current house was always intended to be a temporary residence in order to pay off our loan. We wanted to build something that was manageable with the full intent of building a larger house to support our growing family in the future.
The trouble is, I don’t necessarily want to work more. I already work 56 hours a week for my full-time job, and overtime comes in the form of extra 12 hour shifts. That’s a lot of extra time away from my family and not something I want to entertain.
That said, I still need to earn more money if I would like to have our mortgage paid off and enjoy some of the peripheral goals I have. For example, my truck is 15 years old and at some point, I’d like a new one. I’d like to build a barn to house more of our equipment and to give me a dedicated workspace year-round. I’d also like to upgrade to a larger (and more expensive) tractor someday. These all cost money.
Failures of the Past
In order to earn more money, I have entertained many streams of income. I’ve failed at most of them. I’m talking about blogging, affiliate marketing, Youtube revenue, the stock market, drop shipping, treasure hunting, a second job, more overtime, freelance writing, binary options, rental opportunities, real estate development, etc. There always seems to be a new, best option for me to earn extra money.
Recently, I’ve decided to focus on earning money from reselling goods on eBay. This is a facet that I have explored in length in the past but never really committed to. I LOVE going to estate sales, garage sales, and auctions. It combines my passion for treasure hunting with my frugal sense of getting a good deal. Why not capitalize on that passion by reselling goods that I can make a profit on?
So that’s my goal – and the focus of my second Youtube channel. It will deal primarily with documenting goods that I have bought at various venues, listed on eBay, and sold for a profit.
My eBay store has now been active for two weeks, and about a week in I had my first sale. Over the past few years, I have accumulated goods at auctions. I had intended these for the sole purpose of selling on Youtube but never got around to. Bre and I also spent a few days cleaning out the house of things we had been keeping to sell. The monetary value of all of these items is well over $1,000.
What am I Listing?
I have decided to primarily focus on listing vintage electronics – VCR’s, vintage video games, vintage cameras and photography equipment, DVD recorders, etc. The monetary value of reselling these items is astonishingly high. You’d be surprised to see what a working vintage VCR can sell for on eBay.
The first item I sold was a power adapter I had incorrectly purchased for my Nikon D700 a few years back. I’ll break that sale down below:
Apologies for the small photo; you’ll have to click to enlarge it. But you can see that I am considering my expenses as $0.01 since I can’t do the math at $0 (you can’t divide by zero to determine the percentage of ROI). Considering I bought this a few years back, I don’t remember how much I paid for it. Since it was collecting dust on the shelf, I’m just counting it as $0.01.
It sold for $24.99. eBay took $2.75 in fees, Paypal took $1.07 in fees, and shipping cost me $7.35 (I paid too much for this). This leaves me with a net profit of $13.81, or a net ROI of 138000%. Not crazy when you look at the monetary value, but pretty dang good when you look at the percentage.
So let’s take that a step further and plan positively for the future. If I can source and sell 2 items a week that deliver that kind of net revenue, I’d be earning $27.62 a week, $55.24 a month, and $718.12 a year. Again, not crazy, but that’s planning conservatively and it’s still $718 more than I have currently.
Planning even larger or more ambitiously, there’s no reason to think that I can’t earn $100 a week or $5200 a year. Many people earn a full-time income from reselling on eBay, so it’s not crazy to think that I can’t earn a supplemental income. My goal for 2020 is to optimize my business and earn enough to buy that new tractor. That’d be roughly $25,000 or $480.77 a week.
Also, consider that an overtime shift for me at work takes 12 hours plus an hour total commute. For this, I earn $300 net for each overtime. To replicate this amount, I could easily earn this much reselling on eBay with a total time involvement of around two hours, or an 84.6% reduction in time expenditure. PLUS, this is time that I’m already spending as I generally enjoy treasure hunting at garage sales, auctions, and estates.
Now, that’s incredibly ambitious, but it’s good to have lofty goals. If you haven’t seen it already, I encourage you to watch Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Trash Talk” series on Youtube. He goes into depth about how realistic it is to earn $1,000 in a weekend sourcing goods to resell from garage sales. And this is coming from a multi-millionaire CEO. Pretty impressive if you ask me.
What are my Current Listings
If you are interested in keeping up to date with my eBay store to see my listings, here’s a link.
Currently, I have listed a vintage Asahi Pentax KX camera with a few lenses, accessories and camera bag I have listed for $199.95. I picked this up for $42.00.
Also, I have listed a Bobbi Brown Hydration set, new in box (lotions and whatnot) that Bre found at a rummage sale. This is listed for $54.95.
Then we have a Texas Instruments TI-84 Plus graphing calculator that Bre snagged from an estate sale. It’s listed for $49.95.
Next, we have a vintage Argus 300 manual slide projector in carrying case listed for $17.95. I picked this up for $11.50. Pretty small margin on this one, but it was part of a larger lot of items on auction. These items are the real moneymakers, so this projector is just gravy on top.
Lastly, we listed a pair of Ecco leather boots that Bre got from a rummage sale and wasn’t wearing. We have it listed for $44.95.
So if all of these items sell for the listed price, we’d have a total of $367.75 minus fees. That’s a really good return on our investment of $53.50. I also have many more items to list which I’ll talk about in the video.
So Why the Second Youtube Channel?
Going forward, I plan on doing videos on my second Youtube channel discussing items I pick up, how much I paid for them, why I bought them, and how much I’m going to list them for. I’m also going to post videos of when things sell and for how much.
The reason I wanted to have a second Youtube channel is to not distract from the theme and message of my main project channel. As a bonus, as this separate channel grows I’ll have the option in the future of monetizing the revenue gained from it which will help my bottom line and my goal of earning $25,000 from this stream of income.
Going forward, I’d encourage you to subscribe to my new channel to stay up to date with my journey to earn extra money for our family and just to enjoy the aspect of following along with actual treasure hunting.
If you have tips or advice for me or other prospective resellers, please add them to the comments below!