A Blitz Yard Sale for Fast Cash

Find yourself in need of money right now? Who doesn't come up against that problem occasionally when the bear is at the door and you need some long green? I have a suggestion.

I'll warn you up front that it may only work once every few years because you'll be calling in favors and selling off stock you might use for a future yard sale while thoroughly exhausting yourself. But in an emergency, it can work, especially if you don't need enough to pay off the national debt.

Hold a yard sale.

I held a last minute yard sale once myself and successfully raised a few bucks that got me through. Had I been a little more organized about it, as I suggest here, perhaps I could've produced more. Luckily, I was able to do this on a weekend when yard salers were on the streets. You may not be able to pick the day you want if the emergency is that great, but it should still be workable.

We know you're already in need of money so we'll assume you can't spare the cost of a newspaper ad.

This being the situation,, you might as well have the sale tomorrow. It means setting a killing pace as you prepare, but it's doable. Start a check-list of things to do, but don't dawdle. The clock is running.

Stock Up

You need lots and lots of sale items. Motorists passing by will slow to see what you have. They'll speed up and leave if you have one table and a box sitting on the ground beside it. You need to entice them to stop.

Clean out your closets, go through the old clothes, fill a box with books and magazines, dig in the kitchen cabinets for old pots and pans, thumb through your CDs and videos for disposables, bring out the knick-knacks you have no need for. Consider just how badly you need all of your houseplants. (Heck, if you had time, you could have propagated some of them and created a tray of little houseplants that could go for 25 cents each, but that's for when you have time to prepare for a regular yard sale.)

Be brutal. This, as Captain Kirk would say, is a yellow alert.

Clean everything. You need to put pricetags on everything you can. People will discard an item without a price tag rather than ask.

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