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I bought this lot of five fishing lures at a garage sale for $8. At the time, that probably felt like a reasonable gamble. Five older lures for a few bucks each is exactly the kind of small purchase that seems harmless. The problem is what happened next. I listed the lot on January 4, 2019 and it did not sell until May 27, 2025. That is roughly 6 years and 5 months of waiting for a sale that, after all the costs are considered, actually turned into a loss. A Little History on

I picked up a group of older computers at what I believe was an estate sale. At the time, I thought I might take some of them apart and sell the components individually. That sounds good in theory, but it also means more testing, more listings, more storage, and more time. This Lenovo ThinkPad X200 ended up being a good reminder that sometimes the easier move is just to sell the whole machine for parts or repair and let someone else decide what they want to do with it. I list

This one is a little different from most of the things I sell because I didn’t source it at an auction, estate sale, or thrift store. I had this 1988 Panini Baseball ’88 Sticker Album since I was a kid. For whatever reason, it followed me around for decades. It was incomplete — only about 25% complete — and eventually I decided there was no real reason to keep hanging onto it. I listed it on November 16, 2019. It finally sold on February 14, 2025. So even after I decided to l

Some of the best inventory doesn’t come from auctions, thrift stores, or estate sales. Sometimes it comes from people you already know. My father-in-law was cleaning out the house and asked if I wanted some old train items because he knew I sold things online. He ended up giving me a larger group of train-related pieces, and this Lionel lot was one of the last items from that batch to finally sell. That’s one of the useful side effects of telling people you resell: once frien

One of the things I’m learning with older toys is that they don’t always need to be complete, boxed, or especially valuable to be worth listing. This McFarlane Toys Al Simmons Spawn figure was sold loose with no packaging. I picked it up as part of a larger toy lot after a friend had after a tenant move out and leave behind a bunch of items. I’d estimate my cost in this figure at about $2. I listed it on May 16, 2020 and eventually sold it on January 29, 2025 for $14.50. That

I recently sold a lot of 12 Jalen Brunson basketball cards for $20. These weren’t cards I bought specifically to resell. I had accumulated them over time as part of the hobby, so I don’t really assign a meaningful cost basis to the lot. They were mostly lower-value cards from brands such as Topps, Finest, Prizm, Mosaic, Hoops, and Donruss. What made me decide to list them was timing. Brunson had recently won Finals MVP, so it seemed like a good opportunity to see whether a gr