Retail Royalty Challenge – Recruitment Drive

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I was recently approached by MoneySupermarket to take place in their Retail Royalty Challenge. The challenge is simple – I was given £30 to buy items that would greatly benefit a local charity. Not only does the challenge mean that I can support a local charity, but it also means that I’m in the running to win a Harrods hamper – considering the name of my blog, I was really up for this!

Choosing a charity was not a problem at all. Branching Out is a charity in my village that helps adults with learning disabilities. I was first introduced to Branching Out when I was 15 and working in the newspaper shop – seeing the clients come in with their support workers. I really looked forward to their visits and helping them to make their purchase. My family have been supporting the charity for years – when my Mum died 6 years ago we asked for donations to Branching Out in lieu of flowers. My Dad, a keen gardener, often takes them plants for the clients to grow and resell. So my mind was instantly made up – I’d be supporting Branching Out.

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Make £10 a Day in July Challenge

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This isn’t a new challenge to myself, and certainly not to some of my readers. I’ve had a very expensive June, which will probably continue into July, as I’ve bought a new (to me) car! It was sort of on the cards for awhile but I had to bring it forward a few months due to my old car breaking down. My Dad has kindly loaned me the money and I really want to pay him back ASAP, at £200 per month, plus anything extra I can manage. The idea behind the £10 per day challenge is that I make £310 extra over the course of the month. Some people doing the challenge on the MSE forums like to include money they’ve saved using coupons, BOGOFs or other deals, but I’m choosing to focus on cold, hard cash in my hand (or in my bank). You can either make £10 per day, or make larger amounts to cover a few days.

I keep track of my money for this challenge by using an online e-savings account, linked to my current account. This isn’t for the (non-existent) interest, but to see the extra money I’ve made kept in one place. I try to add to it daily, and seeing it grow until it hopefully reaches £310. This also stops me spending the money…hopefully.

So what will I do with £310? £200 will go towards paying my Dad back, and £110 will go towards my Florida spending money.

Right now I don’t really have much idea about how I’m going to achieve this. Here is a handy list to help me:

  • Selling on eBay
  • Visiting a car boot sale next weekend to then sell items on eBay (blog post about what to buy at a boot sale)
  • Get items listed (and hopefully sold) on Facebook selling groups
  • Quidco £15 cashback for bingo expected on 14th July
  • Goal: £5 from AppTrailers
  • £5 to cash out from AppXpert (come back on Wednesday for a blog post)
  • Goal: £10 from Swagbucks
  • Get a move on with claiming my income tax refund due to being unemployed for part of the year.

As you can see, this is no where near the £310 I need to make. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated, and I will be sure to keep you all updated.

Yard/Garage Sale

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The less we talk about June’s car boot sale challenge, the better. All the items are in a massive jumble, and round my Dad’s house, so they needed to be sorted. I could have gone over and spent a few hours sorting the items out, but instead I decided that we should have a yard sale! Meaning I could spread everything over our driveway and get everything into a sensible order – and if I’m lucky, we could make some money. I had toyed with the idea before, but a few weeks ago we were driving home one Saturday and came across two yard sales – one where I got some Lego destined for selling, and the other where they wanted ridiculous prices for the items they had. But it meant that an idea was forming in my head, and when we got home to discover that the village church, a few yards from our house, would be having a fun day on Saturday, my mind was made up.

I made an image (thanks to Photoshop) detailing the yard sale with the date and times, a rough list of what we were selling and the location. Luckily we live opposite a shop, so instead of advertising our address I was able to state that it was ‘near X Shop’. You could also leave the address off and ask people to message you for more details. I then put this image on Facebook and shared it with all the selling groups I’m a member of (check their rules first!). I also made a cardboard sign simply stating ‘Yard Sale Sat 8 June’ and put it outside our house on Tuesday evening (after checking the BBC Weather 5 day forecast). I didn’t bother with putting posters up anywhere for two reasons – firstly being that we’d get a lot of potential buyers from the church fun day and shop just opposite our house and secondly because a large majority of the shops charge for putting adverts up. A yard sale is totally new territory to me, so I didn’t want to waste any money!

On the day my Dad came over with a car load of things from his shed, and made a comment about how my brother used to watch cartoons on a Saturday morning, yet here I am setting up a yard sale on my Saturday morning. I think this sums me up extremely well!

We set up at around 9.30 and started packing up around 2.30. We could have probably gone on for longer but it was a cold day (I thought June was summertime…). There were quiet periods, but often there was an influx of customers. Being at home really made all the difference – Tony and I took breaks in half hour chunks meaning that I could whizz around the house getting chores done. I’m not quite sure what he managed to get done – I can only imagine it was some XBox gaming.

The difference between having a yard sale and doing a boot sale is that a yard sale was out of the ordinary – people were really taking their time to look at items, and things that hadn’t even been noticed at boot sales were being sold. People were also willing to pay us more than we were asking for, which was lovely! I found that no one wanted to haggle – the price was the price and it was paid, no questions asked! We also managed to sell some more bulky items that wouldn’t be worth taking to a boot sale, simply because of the space they would take up in the car.

Whilst packing up I decided to photograph everything in job lots for eBay – a cosmetic lot, a comic book lot, a clothing lot, a craft lot and then ‘everything else’ lot which are now all sat on eBay for collection only.

After we totalled up the money we’d discovered that we made a lovely £61.10! Considering we didn’t have to leave the house, pay for any petrol or stall fees, I was absolutely thrilled.

A great idea I’ve seen is to have a village/town wide yard sale – someone organises this where a map is printed, and on one set date loads of people have yard sales. My village did one last year and it was very successful for buyers and sellers. Those who couldn’t so a yard sale for whatever reason were also allowed to set up a stall in the village hall. It might be worth checking to see if something like that is happening in your area, or if you’re feeling brave enough, setting one up yourself!

So, would I do it again? I’d have to say yes! Not having to pay for petrol, not having to pay for a stall and also being right at home when nature called was lovely! It was a shame that the day was overcast, it would have made an even nicer day had the sun decided to come out.

June’s Car Boot Sale Challenge

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I’ve been working on Project eBay Room/Home Office for a few weeks now, and it is coming along nicely. However, in the process I came across a lot of ‘rubbish’ that I’m trying to sell – namely things that haven’t sold on eBay, or due to the increase in postage prices, they aren’t worth selling online. I’m very fortunate in the fact that I could take all of these ‘treasures’ to my Dad’s house and store them in the shed. But whilst transporting yet another car load of treasures to his shed, I discovered that I’ve managed to get the shed quite full. Oops.

And so, June’s challenge was born. Very different to May’s Grocery Challenge, where we challenged ourselves to spend just £150 on groceries, toiletries and pet items, June’s challenge is to do at least one car boot sale every weekend. Eep. I would love to have the money that doing 10 car boot sales would bring, but I’m not sure we’d be able to cope with that!

The ‘rules’:

  • Attend a minimum of 5 car boot sales as sellers, one per weekend.
  • I will deduct petrol costs from our takings – the best boot sales are between 13 and 20 miles away from us, and petrol is expensive!
  • Earnings will be split 4 ways (perhaps not equally) between me, Tony*, our joint account and Florida. *I suppose he deserves something for loading and unloading the car, not to mention being awake at the ungodly hour.

Challenges:
Of course it is our anniversary in June, and of course it is at a weekend. Tough! We can be home and unpacked before 1.30pm leaving the rest of the day free for anniversary celebrations. Being able to do another boot sale the following day, when hungover, might be off the cards though. And of course there is the great British weather to contend with, but hopefully we will still be able to do a minimum of 5 boot sales.

Are you going to do any boot sales this month? If you fancy doing a car boot sale then be sure to check out my tips for sellers.

Make £££ this bank holiday

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The one good thing about May is that you get not just one, but two bank holidays. I know that a lot of the time might be spent outside in the sun, or full of busy, but if you need a bit of a cash boost then read on for ways to make guaranteed money with very little time spent.

Firstly, don’t miss out on eBay’s free listing weekend, where you can list anything with a start price of £1 or more, limited to 100 items, for free! A fantastic tip that I recently picked up is to start your listings on a Saturday, but make them only 1 day listings. Then on Sunday, relist everything else that hasn’t sold, but for 7 days. This means that buyers who want something *now* and are searching for items ending soon find your items. I trialled this last free listing and made £35. Worried that your item won’t sell for as much as a 7 day listing? Don’t be! I’ve not found this to have a negative impact.

Secondly, go through your books, CDs, DVDs and games. You can see if Amazon Trade in or Zapper are accepting any of your books, then get them parcelled up. Then try your CDs, games and DVDs on a combination of Music Magpie, CEX and Zapper. If you’re very organised you can even get them to the Post Office before they close on Saturday, and the money will be on it’s way to you before you know it. Even better, if you have a CEX store local to you then take your items in store to trade for instant cash.

If you want a chance to earn a bit more then you can list your items on the Amazon Marketplace and Playtrade. Your items are listing for a longer time (up to 90 days), but listing is free and you can normally price them more competitively.

Thirdly, any items that aren’t suitable for eBay or aren’t accepted by the sites listed above, there’s your local Facebook selling group. On Facebook, search for the name of your town or city and “selling” and see what comes up. The rules vary group by group, so be sure to check them out. Generally you create a public album on your own Facebook profile and fill it with photos of the items you’re selling. Be sure to add the price, location and a short description. Hopefully, before you know it, someone will be over with some cash for your goods! These groups are great for larger items such as bikes and furniture, but I’ve seen anything and everything sell!

Search through your jewellery box for any unwanted gold – I’m not talking engagement rings here, but rather broken necklaces or earrings. I made almost £700 selling my broken gold to Hatton Gardens Metal, which you can read about here.

Once you’ve done that, and if you’re feeling adventurous enough, load your car up for a car boot sale on Sunday or Monday morning. Read my selling tips here

Now that you’ve got all the ‘manual labour’ out the way, you can sit down at your computer and carry out the following tasks:

  • Join cashback sites. You can read my post about them here. Then trawl through looking for any freebies or cashback for nothing.
  • Play bingo! Here are links to my bingo posts, including information on which ones are free and which ones are risk free - Jackpot Joy, BingoCams, Fabulous Bingo,  Little Miss Bingo, Free Bingo or Bingo for Cashback.
  • And finally, if you haven’t already, join Swagbucks. This has to be my biggest no outlay and no selling earner.

If after all of that you’re still itching for more then you can check out my category list and sign up for surveys, mystery shopping earning through your smart phone.

Have a good bank holiday everyone!