Personal Finance Resources

Everybody would like to make a living at the house. But most don’t think that small time enterprises like a garage sale business will get them anywhere. Well if you have a strong location that gets through traffic, then you are already poised to succeed in garage sales. Even if you don’t have the best of locations, you can still build a solid base of clients that will come back to you time and time again if you continue to bring new and interesting items to the market. I know of one lady in our Church that does nothing but her garage sale every weekend, and that’s how they make their living.

Benefits of a Garage Sale Business

Independence. Pure and simple. This is what every entrepreneur is looking for. I am an internet and real estate entrepreneur and that is exactly what I want: the opportunity to decide what I will be doing from day to day. And with the right strategy, you can turn your home into a cash getting machine.

Also, being able to be at home most of the time in your business is a real plus for having a garage sale. In my business, I do most of the activity from the house, through working on the computer or engaging in phone calls. However, with almost every business out there, you’ll need to get out of the house from time to time to run errands and meet people.

Getting Your Own Garage Sale Business Started

For many folks, it isn’t going to be the selling part that is going to hold them back from making money in garage sales. It is going to be finding and obtaining new and valuable inventory at low enough prices to be able to sell on the weekend. So here is a couple of ideas for finding inventory at very low prices, enough for you to be able to resell and profit from them:

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This is just going to be a quick update, but I have finally been able to borrow the appropriate tools, and have the time to cut down the branches that were preventing the sunlight from hitting the garden directly. Remember those live oaks from my previous update? Well, now that I have the offending branches cut down and out of the way (well almost out of the way, I still need to cut the large oak branch into smaller pieces to be disposed of) I can proceed with spading up the garden.

This will be the last step before we can sow seeds for the fruits and vegetables we intend to grow. When I finish up with the work, I will up load some pictures of how the live oak tree looks now, and how the garden looks after getting it spaded up. Since this ground has not been spaded up before, it will be interesting to see how well, or how poorly, the soil will break up.

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Here’s the situation. We have a duplex that is 100% occupied. Now, it has an interesting design, and when I say interesting, I mean that it was designed poorly. It is a one story duplex that has pitched roofs over the outside half of the units, with a flat roof through the middle. What has happened is that the flat roof does not have a proper drip edge in the back where the water drains, and therefore the Masonite on the rear exterior of the building has rotted out.

Now, we had it in the plans to repair this issue…at some point. But, due to the insurance company finding out about the rotted exterior, they have issued a warning letter stating that we must do something about the exterior of the building or they will cancel the insurance on the property. So we have been working to secure a quote to fix the damages. But…

With the issue being forced by the insurance company, we see an opportunity to increase the value, and perhaps the rent that we can charge. There is a porch in the back of the complex that has exterior walls on three sides, and already has the full pier and beam foundation ready to go underneath it. So we are thinking about demolishing the deck, and adding a laundry room to each of the rental units. As they currently do not have a laundry room, it would be of importance to a renter to have this luxury, and with the added square footage, we might be able to charge more rent.

Problems with the repairs

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Gas prices are insane these days, and my anger increases with price increases. Is there any relief for the hard working American person? Well my prediction is…no…not any time soon at least. You have to understand some of the underlying factors that contribute to gasoline prices to be able to understand why the price is so high. The basic principles are built on economic supply and demand. You see, currently are our country is suffering from a constant / increasing demand for gasoline, and the supply has been restricted.

Think about it this way, let’s say you really needed a gallon of milk, and your local grocery store only had a handful of milk gallons, and they didn’t expect to be stocking very many more gallons of milk over the next several months. Well as people would buy out the gallons of milk they had, when they brought in new shipments of milk, they would increase the price for two reasons: one to make more money on the milk they were selling, and two, to be able to carry some stock for a while without being sold out due to people changing their habits because of cost increases.

Some Thoughts About Our Domestic Gas Prices

The same thing is happening in the gasoline industry. Americans have not seen high gas prices for a long time, and have gotten very accustomed to long commutes and traveling a lot for vacations. Before hurricane Katrina and other economical problems, gasoline was very cheap, and so it wasn’t a problem. But today, there is a shortage of available gasoline, and prices are soaring to all time highs. Why is that? Well here are some reasons for the shortage:

1. Natural disasters have knocked out some productive domestic refineries, and they have been slow to get back online and in full production.
2. Restrictive government regulations placed on oil companies have disallowed the construction of new refineries in this country. In fact, we have not built a new refinery since 1976!
3. Further government restrictions have disallowed the exploration and discovery of new oil deposits in this country. Special interest and environmental wackos have contributed to the passing of these ridiculous regulations.
4. The creates far too great of a dependence on foreign oil. Our oil imports from Canada and Latin America are so great, that they are able to dictate the price to us.

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Just last week, I talked about how we are going to start growing our own food, and I want you to know that I do my best to act upon what I say. Well, just last Thursday, we started putting the plan into action. I was thinking of what I could use to set the outline of the garden, when my wife told me that there were a few railroad ties that the previous owner of the house used to set against the fence between our property and the neighbor’s property. I assume at some point in the past the neighbors had dogs, or something that was getting under the fence. But anyways, I drug those railroad ties, along with some 4 x 4 treated lumber that I found near the same area, and created the outside edge of the garden.

I did not have enough railroad ties and 4 x 4 pieces of wood to finish the garden in the size that I wanted, so I had to get creative. So what I figured out was to take from the large limb that we had cut up and put back behind the house to be picked up by the trash man, cut that limb to size, and used it to fill the gaps so I could get the size garden I wanted. With the way the materials lined out and looking at my original plan, I decided to build a 15 x 16 foot garden, instead of the 16 x 16 foot garden I had originally planned. It worked great, and here is the result:

Now, before we get to the problems here, I wanted to point out the good things. First, we did not have to buy any railroad ties or lumber to get this garden laid out and ready to go. Further, the leaves that we put in the garden to fertilize the ground weren’t paid for either, we have a couple of live oak trees (see right) that provide us plenty of leaves that we can rake up and use for fertilizer.

But, as you probably can tell, we have a problem here. The problem is that the live oaks and other trees that are providing us with the free fertilizer are also giving us too much shade. I took this picture during the middle of the day, and I am going to have to solve the problem of too much shade. As you may know, most vegetables need direct sunlight to do well, and only part of the day does the garden really get the good, direct sunshine.

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This is a good resource to look at when you are looking to get into real estate investing, or you are struggle with investing in this downward market. Check it out, it helps you to understand that there can still be a lot of money made, even though the price of homes are dropping rapidly.

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Preparing and selling a mobile home like one the I own has proven to be a daunting task. Getting my subcontractor in to fix the holes that the tenant’s dogs put in the walls of the trailer did open the door of opportunity for me to fix some of previous holes in the walls when I first purchased the property. The problem is, with high building materials costs and labor these days, it is a expensive investment. Further, with the house market the way it is today, we may not be able to find a buyer for the property. This may force me to rent the place back out again, but if I am going to rent it again, I am going to be well compensated for it. I think I will ask for $700 a month to rent it out again.

Anyways, I wanted to give you the details on all the items that we are fixing or have already fixed in the home:

• Hole in living room wall - this hole was so big there was no chance for patching it, I had to replace the entire sheet of drywall. Fortunately, in trailers, there really isn’t any taping an floating, as the manufacturers just put trim pieces between each of the sheets of drywall.
• Hole in adjacent living room wall - this was a small hole, and my subcontractor came up with the idea to install a chair rail around the living room walls, thus covering the hole. The hole is high, about 6 inches higher than a normal chair rail, but I don’t think anyone will notice.
• Hole in bathroom wall - this we are going to be fixing through a simple patch and painting the bathroom. It is a very small bathroom, so the expense will not be great to go ahead and paint the entire room.
• Holes in bathroom door - nothing much we could do here. We thought about applying a return air vent to the bottom of the door to cover the hole, but it is such a large hole and the price to replace the door was only about $5-10 more expensive, so I opted to replace the entire door.
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With food costs soaring to unbelievable levels, we have decided to take action against the insanity. We have decided to grow some of our own food, to get the grocery costs down. Now, we are still getting groceries for free, but it doesn’t take care of our entire need. But if you are skeptical about getting your own garden started, let me address some of the likely problems / questions you might have:

• Growing Your Own Food Takes too Much Time
  It really doesn’t take as much time as you might think. If you just did a small garden of about 10 feet by 10 feet, that is only 100 square feet, and if you used a motorized tiller to break up the soil combined with some leaves or grass clippings from the yard, you might have as little as an afternoon invested in prepping and sowing your garden.
• A Garden Won’t Produce Enough Food to be Worth it
  I can assure you if you stick to vegetables like tomatoes, squash, green beans, etc. the plants will produce multiple harvests for you. As a kid, I remember working in my grandfather’s garden and picking green beans every couple of days. Bags and bags of green beans were produced in a single season.
• Getting Started is too Expensive, I Don’t have the Tools
  We just bought all the tools and seeds necessary to start our garden this year. We bought a spade fork, hoe, hand spades, cages for tomato plants, 3 cubic feet of garden soil, some plant food (the little balls of fertilizer), and seeds at our local Lowes all for about $100. How far does $100 go at the grocery store these days?

We have all kinds of seeds that we are going to plant for this year’s crop. Everything from tomatoes, squash, green beans, to onion, carrots and romaine lettuce we’ll be raising right in our back yard. And getting to enjoy fresh vegetables that you have grown yourself just makes dinner that much sweeter.

I plan to setup a 16 foot by 16 foot garden in my back yard. We will be simply spading and turning over as much of the dirt as possible, and burying the grass combined with leaves for the main fertilizer. Then when I sow the seeds, I will make sure to cover the top layer with the garden soil I bought. I will keep you posted on the progress. If you have questions or comments, please leave then below.

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