We felt that these items were not suitable to sell at a Moving Sale as we would not get the appropriate audience. We did our research and found ourselves some establishments that may be interested in purchasing such collections. Michael made the decision to hold onto the valuable baseball cards and see if he could sell the less valuable ones in bulk. I decided to sell all of my vinyl records.
Today was also the day that we would take in the donations for the 2nd Annual Veterans Stand Down to benefit men and women who have served in the United States Military and Reserves. We set off about 10:00am this morning.
We arrived at Legacy Sports Cards at 10:38am. It is a decent looking business situated in a strip mall in a decent neighborhood on W. Sahara. They, of course, were not open. Their hours are 11am-7pm. Duh, who wants to buy sports cards before 11am? We then realized that we would need to swing by on our way back from our two other stops. Next stop, Record City. It is situated, well, I'll just show you......
After driving around the block a few times, we finally managed to pull into the parking lot. (there was road work everywhere). I said to Michael, "This place looks sketchy." The boy in the backseat promptly repeated my words. I turned to him and said, "Yes, sweety but let's make sure we don't say that when we walk in the door." He agreed, lucky for me!
We walked in with our Huggies Diaper Box full of vinyl records and asked the guy in charge if he was interested in buying our records. He looked at us and said, "I'm only interested in modern records." I'm pretty sure at that point, a look of confusion came accross my face that intensified the already deep wrinkle I have in the middle of my forehead. I mean, didn't they stop making vinyl in the early 90's? Wouldn't that mean that modern records don't exist? So I said, "I have a bunch of 80's alternative records." He suddenly perked up and decided to look through my records. I then processed his age in my head and realized that, to him, the 80's WERE modern. As he's looking through my records, I am thinking to myself, "This guy will probably offer me ten bucks." After sorting them into two piles, one much smaller than the other, he said, "I'll give you $40 for all of them." Well, the excitement I felt was overwhelming! I tried to act all casual, as to not make him think he could have offered me less, and said, "OK, that sounds good." CHAAAA CHING!
Next stop, donations for veterans. This was relitively uneventful except for the fact that we didn't know the neighborhood and for some reason the address wasn't coming up on the Tom Tom. We found it eventually and three guys helped us bring all of the bags and boxes inside. They issued me a receipt for tax purposes and allowed me to fill in the value of the donation. By my calculations, this should knock off about $25 from my tax bill this year! Cha Ching!
Feeling quite proud of our accomplishments thus far, we headed back towards Legacy Sports Cards. By this time, they had finally opened up shop. Apparently, they weren't interested in any of the cards Michael had. He offered to just hand them over for free and they said they would glady take them and donate them to the Boys and Girls Club. No "cha ching" this time but at least we know someone will eventually appreciate them.
We headed home, hungry, thirsty and dying for a pee. We accomplished all three of our stops in about 2 hours. When I arrived at home, I checked my e-mail (after taking care of the three aforementioned problems) only to find that Amazon.com
had received my DVD's for trade-in (I sent them in last week) and had issued me credit in the amount of $6.20. Cha Ching! I can use this money to buy anything I want on Amazon. I plan on downloading music.All in all, it has been a profitable few days. Between the Moving Sale and today's successes, we are $771.20 richer. I have decided that I am going to keep track of all the extra (ONLY at this point) income we bring in on this little journey of ours and document it here for you, dear readers. If I can figure it out, I might just add a counter or something fancy like that!
4 comments:
Ooooh, yes! A counter! I would love that. And seriously "dying for a pee" has got to be the best phrase I've read all day.
So the best I could come up with was a page with the dollar amount to date. Then the page has links to the post that back up the dollar amounts......take a look let me know what you think!
Shar, I enjoy reading your journey and will keep you guys in my thoughts!
BTW - you probably know this already but gotta bring it up anyways - did you know that you would probably end up w/ much bigger tax deduction than $25 if you would itemized the donated goods to goodwill instead of the "bag method". Since you said "We found it eventually and three guys helped us bring all of the bags and boxes inside" i assume you donated alot of stuff. Yes. it will require a little extra work but hmmm... somehow I guess you would perhaps do i anyways?
I am unsure if the organization you donated the items has a their own "fair market value of general items" - chart, but here's one from Salvation Army:
http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/usn/www_usn_2.nsf/0/d477340ffa28755c8525743d0049d1ef?opendocument
:).
Hanna
Thanks Hanna, I always use "It's deductable" to itemize my donations. I figure I donated about $100 worth of stuff.....that will give us $100 deduction which typically = $25 less taxes owed. I didn't know that Salvation Army had there own list....pretty cool!
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