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INCREASING YOUR INCOME

By increasing our income, we become more financially secure. This is a good thing. It makes it easier to pay our bills and save for a rainy day, or retirement. By the way, my definition of retirement is “being able to do what I want to do without having to sell my time on a daily basis.” Most people work 40 hours per week so they can do what they want on weekends. In other words, they work five days to be free on two days. While that may be necessary at first, in the long run, it would be good to reverse that ratio; i.e., work two days to be able to do as we please on 5 days. On the other hand, if you enjoy what you are doing, perhaps it would be good enough to work part-time on five days and pursue a hobby on the other two days. That’s your call.

Traditionally, education has been a way to raise one’s productivity and get out of the rat race. Studies have shown that people with college degrees generally earn more during a lifetime than people without a college degree. There are exceptions, of course. Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg come to mind. They were all college dropouts. There are many more…see https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/50-super-successful-college-dropouts/9/. If you don’t think you have what it takes to become the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, perhaps a more traditional approach is better.

But first, let’s consider what happened to the U.S. economy between the middle of March and the end of April of 2020. It was called the COVID-19 scare. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, more than 33 million people applied for unemployment insurance. See https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/third-quarter-2020/jobs-hit-hardest-covid-19. This raised the unemployment level from 3.5% to 14.7%. Hardest hit jobs were in manufacturing, service, leisure, and hospitality industries. That included restaurants, hair salons, movie theaters, bars, fitness centers, libraries, and “non-essential” manufacturers. I remember reading about how can manufacturers were deemed non-essential, while soup manufacturers were deemed essential…until the soup manufacturers didn’t have a way to ship their soup. The bottom line is that you might want to consider a line of work that is considered “essential” by the government decision-makers. See https://www.nolo.com/covid-19/what-businesses-qualify-as-an-essential-service-during-the-covid-19-outbreak.html to get an idea as to what was considered essential and what wasn’t. As a landlord, I remember turning potential tenants away because they were unemployed; i.e., “non-essential.” No one knew how long they would be unemployed, or if their old jobs would exist after the government restrictions were lifted.

Something else we learned from the COVID-19 scare was that many people could work from home with a computer and an internet connection. While I won’t go into the sociological and mental health effects of staying home or being locked up for long periods of time, people eventually learned to adapt (although homicide rates went up 30% during the COVID scare). See https://www.voanews.com/a/why-homicide-rates-spiked-30-during-the-pandemic-/6420391.html. Nevertheless, computer skills became exceptionally important. There was also a migration out of the bigger cities into the smaller towns and countryside. Being in a population center around lots of possibly-infected people was not desirable.

More Education

More education can be pursued in a variety of ways. While a high school or college diploma doesn’t guarantee more knowledge, it does suggest to employers that you are willing and able to jump through enough hoops to get the job done. That alone is worth something.

If you are perceived as a job hopper, many employers won’t want to invest the time and money into your training. The longer you can stick with something, the more reliable you will be considered and the more employable you will be thought to be.

School

So let’s start with the obvious…traditional schooling. Do you have a high school diploma? If no, you can get a GED certificate (General Educational Development) by taking and passing a four-part test (Math, Science, Social Studies, and Reasoning through Language Arts). Upon passing the test, a certificate will be issued by the state in which you took the exam (not all states offer the exam). To see if your state offers it, see https://ged.com. Nowadays, you can prepare for the exam online, but you have to go to a testing center to take the actual GED exam.

Obtaining a college education can be more difficult and time-consuming than getting a high school degree or GED. By the way, when I say college, this includes a university…usually the only difference between a college and a university is the size. A university may consist of several or many colleges, thus universities are usually larger than colleges. From now on, I will call them colleges.

The first thing you’ll want to know is that many colleges charge more for people who are from another state (out-of-state). You can get around this problem by moving to the state in which your chosen college is ahead of time. Each state has its own requirements as to how long you have to live in that state before you qualify for the “in-state” tuition charges. The rules may be different for veterans. You’ll have to do some research to find out about your chosen school and state.

The second thing you’ll want to research is whether your chosen college has part-time student programs or only full-time student programs, and whether it has an online program that can be done from home. I’m assuming that you are currently working and will probably want a part-time and/or online program…but I could be wrong. Still, it’s something to be aware of.

Next, if you’ve gotten this far, you’ll want to know about costs. Each college will have its own website with costs. State universities are generally cheaper than private colleges. I am not recommending any school in particular, but just for demonstration purposes, let’s look at the costs for attending Penn State University (either their main campus at University Park, or their satellite campuses around the state). See https://admissions.psu.edu/costs-aid/tuition. Student aid/scholarships will be another topic to research.

The last trick to getting into a college that I want to mention here is that it is generally easier to get into a college during their summer school program or by applying to night school…fewer people want to spend their summer or evenings in school, so schools are generally more lenient in their requirements if you opt to start then. Tuition is oft times cheaper in the summer, too. The drawback is that fewer courses are offered during summer and evening programs. Hopefully, you can find something you would like to take. Still, if you can get in during the summer or in night school and do a good job, this could increase your chances of being admitted in their fall (the busiest season) or winter programs (the second best time to get in).

A longer approach to higher education is to start out by auditing a course. This means that you are not seeking a degree, merely the knowledge offered in that course. As long as there is room in the class you are interested in taking, this is usually the easiest way to get your foot in the college door. After auditing a course or two, you might change your mind and decide that you really like that subject and you’d like to get a degree after all. If you made a favorable impression with the professors in the courses you audited, the college might let you enter as a degree candidate. I emphasize the word “might.” There are no guarantees in higher education, only costs.

If you are only interested in obtaining knowledge (without a degree) there is another possibility…a MOOC, which stands for Massive Open Online Course. See https://www.mooc.org/. Best of all, MOOCs are free, and some may offer a Certificate of Completion.

Books

Along similar lines, books are still available as a source of learning, either in your local library, purchased from bookstores or yard sales and auctions, or by ordering on-line through numerous vendors.

The bottom line, of course, is for your education to increase your earning power and thus make your life more financially secure. Alternately, you could seek education about a topic that you would enjoy pursuing as a sideline or hobby. In my case, I’ve been learning more about gardening. On this topic, there are plenty of free educational videos on YouTube.

Employed or Self-Employed

A simple way to increase your income is to work more hours…especially if your employer pays you time-and-a-half for overtime. While some people enjoy their leisure time more than the prospect of making more money, there may be merit in sacrificing some leisure time to make ends meet.

I don’t know of any business that doesn’t want more sales. If you are in sales, you already know that sales is a numbers game. The more prospects you contact, the greater your chances of making a sale. (The same holds true for finding a date or a spouse.) Somehow, you have to find more prospects to contact. The internet has made that easier in some ways, but more difficult in other ways. If you aren’t in sales, is there any way you could get into sales? Okay, so you don’t like people…maybe sales isn’t right for you.

Whether you are in sales or not, what employers are looking for is greater productivity from their employees:more production for the same amount of pay. (That’s why robots are becoming increasingly popular.) Unfortunately, what many employers don’t know is that the more capital and education that is invested in an employee, the more productive he/she can become. My favorite example is the difference between someone’s using a shovel and his/her using a backhoe. A backhoe costs more, sure, but it’s so much more productive when digging a ditch than a shovel is. The job can be done in a fraction of the time. Then you have to find more work for the backhoe…more sales. Business is a never ending job. Find or invent more products and sell them.

Then again, maybe the economy isn’t cooperating and sales are down, profits are down, and employment is down. Maybe there’s nothing you can do to help your employer…maybe you’d be better off finding a different employer, or a different line of work, or a different economy. Unemployment is often the impetus for becoming self-employed. You were just laid off by your inefficient, incompetent, losing employer. And you could see all the things that were being done inefficiently, wastefully, or stupidly. Perhaps his competitor would benefit from your ideas about efficiency. Or, perhaps you could find a way to start a competing business? “But wait a second,” you say, “I can’t start a business. I can’t afford to do that.” Rather than saying “I can’t do that,” perhaps you could say “How can I do that?” That gets your mind thinking. If you say, “I can’t do that,” that ends the conversation and your brain turns off. Try asking yourself how you can accomplish something, rather than saying “I can’t.” See if it makes a difference. I like a quote attributed to a famous general (Hannibal). He said, “I will either find a way, or make a way.” Put your brain and creativity to work…find a way, or make a way.

Side Gigs and Hobbies

When my wife and I were first married, we wanted to become Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs), so we joined a firm that was registered as a CTA. It also held educational services on the side…putting on seminars. A side gig? Actually, they used it as a means of prospecting for new CTA customers. At any rate, they put us in charge of the educational end of things and spun us off into a separate business. For years, we wrote home study courses, books, and booklets. Eventually, we added a print shop to print our own material. A side gig? Actually, we became better at printing and binding our own material than other local printers were. Some other print shops even came to us for their binding needs. Then, along came the internet and we sold off the print shop. What a relief! (I hated running a printing press. Fixing a broken down press was even worse than running it. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t afraid to take the press apart to see what was wrong with it, but putting it back together was often above my pay grade.)

On the side, we bought a rental property and renovated it. A side gig? It was easier than fixing a printing press…fewer moving parts! After twenty years of renovating apartments on the side, we finally had accumulated enough apartments that we went full time as landlords…except for weekends. On weekends, we cleared a few acres of land and planted some fruit trees and berry bushes. A side gig? When people asked me what I did on weekends, I used to say that I was a weekend farmer, until someone corrected me. He said farmers grow corn, wheat, soybeans, etc., with big equipment on large tracts of land. Gardeners grow fruits and vegetables in smaller quantities. Okay, so now I say I’m a gardener because I grow fruits and vegetables in smaller quantities (not enough to be self-sufficient, but enough to cut my food bill substantially). Nevertheless, I’ve been spending my weekends (spring, summer, and fall) for the past 16 years growing fruit trees, berry bushes, and vegetables. Some people might say it’s a waste of time, or an under-utilization of my skills, but my wife and I enjoy it. What else should we do on weekends? Something we don’t enjoy? When I think of a side gig or hobby, I think of something to do when you aren’t earning a living. That’s not to say that a side gig or hobby couldn’t make enough money to eventually become a full-time thing or make enough money to live on. It could. It could also save you money on things you would otherwise buy.

I guess I would start by asking myself what kinds of things I enjoy doing on the side (part-time). Even if they only make a little money in the short run, they could blossom into something bigger in the long run, assuming you stick with it long enough. For example, I have a tenant who was a banker when he rented his apartment from me. Sometime later when I ran into him, I noticed that he had a van with a sign on the side advertising electric lift chairs. I asked him about it, and he said that he was no longer a banker and asked if I knew anyone who needed an electric lift chair installed in their home? He had started out selling lift chairs on the side and eventually made it a full-time business. Another tenant had a job working for someone else as a handyman. He eventually became his own boss and had a number of people working for him. I also had an employee, when we had our print shop who later started a home nursing care business. The last I knew, he had 150 employees. It can be done.

To make money on the side, you probably have to sell something…either your time (skills) or a product. For a list of 100 possible “side hustles,” see https://parade.com/976110/marynliles/side-hustle-ideas/. I should also mention a book called Side Hustle Bible by James Altucher. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination and willingness to experiment.

SELL YOUR CLUTTER

Many of the tenants I’ve seen have more stuff than they know what to do with. They either need a bigger apartment, or they rent a storage bin. That’s why storage bins have done so well over the years. There are even people who go around buying up the contents of storage bins that the tenants have stopped paying their rent on. These buyers look for signs as to how much the abandoned property might be worth and they bid accordingly. Then they turn around and sell the stuff in an attempt to earn a profit. Of course, this requires an extensive knowledge of the value of many items. Not everyone can do that. They might resell things through Craigslist.com, or eBay.com, or Amazon.com, or Etsy.com, etc. See https://www.shopify.com/blog/online-selling-sites for a list of 22 on-line websites on which you might sell things. Or, you could build your own on-line store with the help of Shopify.com, or other shopping cart software.

When I have a tenant move out and he/she leaves things behind, or when I renovate an apartment and have things I don’t want (but somebody might find them useful), I often put them on the curb in front of one of my rentals. It’s always amazing to me how quickly those things disappear. Everything from old windows, to boards, to buckets, to furniture, to clothing. You name it, it disappears. In other words, there are people out there who will take just about anything, if the price is right. Who knows, perhaps they sell that stuff somewhere?

After you’ve cleaned out all your clutter, you can help your friends and other people, to do the same. I knew a lady who would go to the thrift store in town (stuff that people had given away), find desirable brand name clothes and sell them on eBay for a profit. It helped that she got feedback from her teenage daughter as to what brands were popular among her classmates. Once again, you have to know the value of those items well enough to make money.


INCREASING YOUR INCOME

By increasing our income, we become more financially secure. This is a good thing. It makes it easier to pay our bills and save for a rainy day, or retirement. By the way, my definition of retirement is “being able to do what I want to do without having to sell my time on a daily basis.” Most people work 40 hours per week so they can do what they want on weekends. In other words, they work five days to be free on two days. While that may be necessary at first, in the long run, it would be good to reverse that ratio; i.e., work two days to be able to do as we please on 5 days. On the other hand, if you enjoy what you are doing, perhaps it would be good enough to work part-time on five days and pursue a hobby on the other two days. That’s your call.

Traditionally, education has been a way to raise one’s productivity and get out of the rat race. Studies have shown that people with college degrees generally earn more during a lifetime than people without a college degree. There are exceptions, of course. Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg come to mind. They were all college dropouts. There are many more…see https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/50-super-successful-college-dropouts/9/. If you don’t think you have what it takes to become the next Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, perhaps a more traditional approach is better.

But first, let’s consider what happened to the U.S. economy between the middle of March and the end of April of 2020. It was called the COVID-19 scare. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, more than 33 million people applied for unemployment insurance. See https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/third-quarter-2020/jobs-hit-hardest-covid-19. This raised the unemployment level from 3.5% to 14.7%. Hardest hit jobs were in manufacturing, service, leisure, and hospitality industries. That included restaurants, hair salons, movie theaters, bars, fitness centers, libraries, and “non-essential” manufacturers. I remember reading about how can manufacturers were deemed non-essential, while soup manufacturers were deemed essential…until the soup manufacturers didn’t have a way to ship their soup. The bottom line is that you might want to consider a line of work that is considered “essential” by the government decision-makers. See https://www.nolo.com/covid-19/what-businesses-qualify-as-an-essential-service-during-the-covid-19-outbreak.html to get an idea as to what was considered essential and what wasn’t. As a landlord, I remember turning potential tenants away because they were unemployed; i.e., “non-essential.” No one knew how long they would be unemployed, or if their old jobs would exist after the government restrictions were lifted.

Something else we learned from the COVID-19 scare was that many people could work from home with a computer and an internet connection. While I won’t go into the sociological and mental health effects of staying home or being locked up for long periods of time, people eventually learned to adapt (although homicide rates went up 30% during the COVID scare). See https://www.voanews.com/a/why-homicide-rates-spiked-30-during-the-pandemic-/6420391.html. Nevertheless, computer skills became exceptionally important. There was also a migration out of the bigger cities into the smaller towns and countryside. Being in a population center around lots of possibly-infected people was not desirable.

More Education

More education can be pursued in a variety of ways. While a high school or college diploma doesn’t guarantee more knowledge, it does suggest to employers that you are willing and able to jump through enough hoops to get the job done. That alone is worth something.

If you are perceived as a job hopper, many employers won’t want to invest the time and money into your training. The longer you can stick with something, the more reliable you will be considered and the more employable you will be thought to be.

School

So let’s start with the obvious…traditional schooling. Do you have a high school diploma? If no, you can get a GED certificate (General Educational Development) by taking and passing a four-part test (Math, Science, Social Studies, and Reasoning through Language Arts). Upon passing the test, a certificate will be issued by the state in which you took the exam (not all states offer the exam). To see if your state offers it, see https://ged.com. Nowadays, you can prepare for the exam online, but you have to go to a testing center to take the actual GED exam.

Obtaining a college education can be more difficult and time-consuming than getting a high school degree or GED. By the way, when I say college, this includes a university…usually the only difference between a college and a university is the size. A university may consist of several or many colleges, thus universities are usually larger than colleges. From now on, I will call them colleges.

The first thing you’ll want to know is that many colleges charge more for people who are from another state (out-of-state). You can get around this problem by moving to the state in which your chosen college is ahead of time. Each state has its own requirements as to how long you have to live in that state before you qualify for the “in-state” tuition charges. The rules may be different for veterans. You’ll have to do some research to find out about your chosen school and state.

The second thing you’ll want to research is whether your chosen college has part-time student programs or only full-time student programs, and whether it has an online program that can be done from home. I’m assuming that you are currently working and will probably want a part-time and/or online program…but I could be wrong. Still, it’s something to be aware of.

Next, if you’ve gotten this far, you’ll want to know about costs. Each college will have its own website with costs. State universities are generally cheaper than private colleges. I am not recommending any school in particular, but just for demonstration purposes, let’s look at the costs for attending Penn State University (either their main campus at University Park, or their satellite campuses around the state). See https://admissions.psu.edu/costs-aid/tuition. Student aid/scholarships will be another topic to research.

The last trick to getting into a college that I want to mention here is that it is generally easier to get into a college during their summer school program or by applying to night school…fewer people want to spend their summer or evenings in school, so schools are generally more lenient in their requirements if you opt to start then. Tuition is oft times cheaper in the summer, too. The drawback is that fewer courses are offered during summer and evening programs. Hopefully, you can find something you would like to take. Still, if you can get in during the summer or in night school and do a good job, this could increase your chances of being admitted in their fall (the busiest season) or winter programs (the second best time to get in).

A longer approach to higher education is to start out by auditing a course. This means that you are not seeking a degree, merely the knowledge offered in that course. As long as there is room in the class you are interested in taking, this is usually the easiest way to get your foot in the college door. After auditing a course or two, you might change your mind and decide that you really like that subject and you’d like to get a degree after all. If you made a favorable impression with the professors in the courses you audited, the college might let you enter as a degree candidate. I emphasize the word “might.” There are no guarantees in higher education, only costs.

If you are only interested in obtaining knowledge (without a degree) there is another possibility…a MOOC, which stands for Massive Open Online Course. See https://www.mooc.org/. Best of all, MOOCs are free, and some may offer a Certificate of Completion.

Books

Along similar lines, books are still available as a source of learning, either in your local library, purchased from bookstores or yard sales and auctions, or by ordering on-line through numerous vendors.

The bottom line, of course, is for your education to increase your earning power and thus make your life more financially secure. Alternately, you could seek education about a topic that you would enjoy pursuing as a sideline or hobby. In my case, I’ve been learning more about gardening. On this topic, there are plenty of free educational videos on YouTube.

Employed or Self-Employed

A simple way to increase your income is to work more hours…especially if your employer pays you time-and-a-half for overtime. While some people enjoy their leisure time more than the prospect of making more money, there may be merit in sacrificing some leisure time to make ends meet.

I don’t know of any business that doesn’t want more sales. If you are in sales, you already know that sales is a numbers game. The more prospects you contact, the greater your chances of making a sale. (The same holds true for finding a date or a spouse.) Somehow, you have to find more prospects to contact. The internet has made that easier in some ways, but more difficult in other ways. If you aren’t in sales, is there any way you could get into sales? Okay, so you don’t like people…maybe sales isn’t right for you.

Whether you are in sales or not, what employers are looking for is greater productivity from their employees:more production for the same amount of pay. (That’s why robots are becoming increasingly popular.) Unfortunately, what many employers don’t know is that the more capital and education that is invested in an employee, the more productive he/she can become. My favorite example is the difference between someone’s using a shovel and his/her using a backhoe. A backhoe costs more, sure, but it’s so much more productive when digging a ditch than a shovel is. The job can be done in a fraction of the time. Then you have to find more work for the backhoe…more sales. Business is a never ending job. Find or invent more products and sell them.

Then again, maybe the economy isn’t cooperating and sales are down, profits are down, and employment is down. Maybe there’s nothing you can do to help your employer…maybe you’d be better off finding a different employer, or a different line of work, or a different economy. Unemployment is often the impetus for becoming self-employed. You were just laid off by your inefficient, incompetent, losing employer. And you could see all the things that were being done inefficiently, wastefully, or stupidly. Perhaps his competitor would benefit from your ideas about efficiency. Or, perhaps you could find a way to start a competing business? “But wait a second,” you say, “I can’t start a business. I can’t afford to do that.” Rather than saying “I can’t do that,” perhaps you could say “How can I do that?” That gets your mind thinking. If you say, “I can’t do that,” that ends the conversation and your brain turns off. Try asking yourself how you can accomplish something, rather than saying “I can’t.” See if it makes a difference. I like a quote attributed to a famous general (Hannibal). He said, “I will either find a way, or make a way.” Put your brain and creativity to work…find a way, or make a way.

Side Gigs and Hobbies

When my wife and I were first married, we wanted to become Commodity Trading Advisors (CTAs), so we joined a firm that was registered as a CTA. It also held educational services on the side…putting on seminars. A side gig? Actually, they used it as a means of prospecting for new CTA customers. At any rate, they put us in charge of the educational end of things and spun us off into a separate business. For years, we wrote home study courses, books, and booklets. Eventually, we added a print shop to print our own material. A side gig? Actually, we became better at printing and binding our own material than other local printers were. Some other print shops even came to us for their binding needs. Then, along came the internet and we sold off the print shop. What a relief! (I hated running a printing press. Fixing a broken down press was even worse than running it. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t afraid to take the press apart to see what was wrong with it, but putting it back together was often above my pay grade.)

On the side, we bought a rental property and renovated it. A side gig? It was easier than fixing a printing press…fewer moving parts! After twenty years of renovating apartments on the side, we finally had accumulated enough apartments that we went full time as landlords…except for weekends. On weekends, we cleared a few acres of land and planted some fruit trees and berry bushes. A side gig? When people asked me what I did on weekends, I used to say that I was a weekend farmer, until someone corrected me. He said farmers grow corn, wheat, soybeans, etc., with big equipment on large tracts of land. Gardeners grow fruits and vegetables in smaller quantities. Okay, so now I say I’m a gardener because I grow fruits and vegetables in smaller quantities (not enough to be self-sufficient, but enough to cut my food bill substantially). Nevertheless, I’ve been spending my weekends (spring, summer, and fall) for the past 16 years growing fruit trees, berry bushes, and vegetables. Some people might say it’s a waste of time, or an under-utilization of my skills, but my wife and I enjoy it. What else should we do on weekends? Something we don’t enjoy? When I think of a side gig or hobby, I think of something to do when you aren’t earning a living. That’s not to say that a side gig or hobby couldn’t make enough money to eventually become a full-time thing or make enough money to live on. It could. It could also save you money on things you would otherwise buy.

I guess I would start by asking myself what kinds of things I enjoy doing on the side (part-time). Even if they only make a little money in the short run, they could blossom into something bigger in the long run, assuming you stick with it long enough. For example, I have a tenant who was a banker when he rented his apartment from me. Sometime later when I ran into him, I noticed that he had a van with a sign on the side advertising electric lift chairs. I asked him about it, and he said that he was no longer a banker and asked if I knew anyone who needed an electric lift chair installed in their home? He had started out selling lift chairs on the side and eventually made it a full-time business. Another tenant had a job working for someone else as a handyman. He eventually became his own boss and had a number of people working for him. I also had an employee, when we had our print shop who later started a home nursing care business. The last I knew, he had 150 employees. It can be done.

To make money on the side, you probably have to sell something…either your time (skills) or a product. For a list of 100 possible “side hustles,” see https://parade.com/976110/marynliles/side-hustle-ideas/. I should also mention a book called Side Hustle Bible by James Altucher. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination and willingness to experiment.

SELL YOUR CLUTTER

Many of the tenants I’ve seen have more stuff than they know what to do with. They either need a bigger apartment, or they rent a storage bin. That’s why storage bins have done so well over the years. There are even people who go around buying up the contents of storage bins that the tenants have stopped paying their rent on. These buyers look for signs as to how much the abandoned property might be worth and they bid accordingly. Then they turn around and sell the stuff in an attempt to earn a profit. Of course, this requires an extensive knowledge of the value of many items. Not everyone can do that. They might resell things through Craigslist.com, or eBay.com, or Amazon.com, or Etsy.com, etc. See https://www.shopify.com/blog/online-selling-sites for a list of 22 on-line websites on which you might sell things. Or, you could build your own on-line store with the help of Shopify.com, or other shopping cart software.

When I have a tenant move out and he/she leaves things behind, or when I renovate an apartment and have things I don’t want (but somebody might find them useful), I often put them on the curb in front of one of my rentals. It’s always amazing to me how quickly those things disappear. Everything from old windows, to boards, to buckets, to furniture, to clothing. You name it, it disappears. In other words, there are people out there who will take just about anything, if the price is right. Who knows, perhaps they sell that stuff somewhere?

After you’ve cleaned out all your clutter, you can help your friends and other people, to do the same. I knew a lady who would go to the thrift store in town (stuff that people had given away), find desirable brand name clothes and sell them on eBay for a profit. It helped that she got feedback from her teenage daughter as to what brands were popular among her classmates. Once again, you have to know the value of those items well enough to make money.