My goal





It was kinda a surreal time.  My mom had just died at 4:00AM and by 10:00AM  my dad,  brother and I were buying cemetery plots for my mom and dad.  For the record, that is way too much reality to take on in half a day.   By 4:00 PM my dad was sleep deprived and we were at my mom's cousins house.  My mom tended to hoard things and her possessions had taken up all the conceivable storage places and she recently moved  on to having them stored in banker boxes lining the hallways.  My dad had been talking a bit over the previous couple of months about living a more streamlined lifestyle.  It was at this late afternoon lunch that he let it be known that he couldn't stand to have all of her junk  all over the house without her.  It was too painful of a reminder.


92 banker boxes of quilting fabric needed to be sold before the dolls

And this is the point I think a lot of people get to, when their spouse is gone they don't want any of their possession laying around as well.  The usual move is to offload stuff as quickly as possible to the local thrift store.   Which is fine if you're a normal person collecting normal stuff.   Used clothing usually has little value, unless it's designer in which case you may be able to get back 40% of the original selling price.  But for people who managed to take family wealth and turn it into possessions that were laying around the house without some grand investment plan simply giving family wealth away just to get rid of it doesn't make a lot of sense.  She had an idea in mind when she bought it as to what to do with it.  But never communicated it.   She knew exactly what she was buying which is great for her, but there are some dolls I have no clue as to what they are.

The great plan was communicated at this lunch.  My twin daughters were 14 years old and just starting high school.  College was coming soon and I didn't have the quarter of a million dollars for each girl to send them where they wanted to go.  I said to my dad "Hey, why don't we sell this stuff and use the money for the girls' college?"    It was an idea my dad embraced.  Instead of seeing the possessions that my mom could no longer use, he could see they were going to turn into a car that would get my girls to class and their first jobs.

The one thing I did right was to offload the cheaper items that clogged up the house first, namely the quilting fabric.   Most people go for the jewelry first.   Back in 2010 we were in the middle of a recession and I knew that people didn't have money to buy jewelry.    So, I pushed this stuff off to better economic times.  I also wanted to cut my teeth on selling items online.

I did a little of everything.  I old on eBay, I sold on Facebook, I hit up local Guilds, I would go to the local Meetups for quilters.  It took a while to even make a dent in her inventory.  We had 92 banker boxes full of quilting supplies.  We sold it all over the course of about five years.  There were 21 banker boxes of yarn.  That sold in about 4 months.  I learned a lot in the first go around.

Adam Carolla has a phrase he uses that I love when he deals with negotiating with people "I do this because I love it.  I don't need to get rich. But, I don't need to make you rich either."  When we sold her sewing machines there were people very anxious to tell us how little the stuff was worth.  My old tennis shoes are worthless.  Nobody wastes their time educating me how worthless my beaten up sneakers are.   One of the sewing machines some lady kept hitting up my dad to buy it for $75 "Oh, that old thing, nobody wants it anymore."   How generous of this woman to offer us so much money for something so worthless.  It sold for $350 a couple of months later.

The most important thing I've learned from selling online is to not to get ahead of myself.  I will post a little at a time.   I won't even consider offering a price on an item until I know what it is.  If I can't discover what it is, I will put it aside. Sometimes it takes a while but I have time.

What I look for is a fair price.  I'm not holding out for top dollar, but I'm also not fire-selling it.

The reason I wanted to blog about this is that I think it's funny that I am in the doll business.  The other reason is that when I got done selling off my mom's yarn I wrote an article about how to sell off a yarn stash.  I really struggled with it at first.  So, I decided to help others who wanted to sell off their yarn but didn't know how, or perhaps weren't as successful selling it.  I got so much praise and appreciation for the article.   As I said in the article "This isn't gospel, these are just ideas."

This time, I am going to document the journey as it happens.  I am going to struggle along the way.  One thing that has occurred  in the past year is I've gotten into building radio controlled airplanes.  There is nothing more rewarding than watching a plane you've spent the last week building go crashing into the ground at full speed.    The real growth didn't occur until I stopped looking at the mishaps as failures but growth opportunities.   Failure is very much under rated.  It's not failure we should worry about.  It's failing and giving up that we should worry about.   So, as I take on this journey I do it with the notion that I may not find success at first.  But I won't give up.

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