Alyssa in the City

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How I Sold All of My Furniture

As I believe I have mentioned before, I had been wanting to move for the last 3-4 years and have found many excuses not to. One of the main reasons being cost, especially cost and hassle of moving all my stuff. I have enough possessions and furniture to fill a whole 1 bedroom apartment (and then some, let’s keep it real here folks). Since I wasn't in love with a lot of my furniture because some of it was from college and some of it was bought cheaply and hastily immediately post-grad without thought for quality. These factors lead to my decision to sell as many of my belongings as possible and I’m going to show you how I did it. 

Garage/Yard Sale

Pros: 

  1. Possibility to sell all your stuff in one day or a weekend. 
  2. Gives you a chance to practice your haggling skills in real time. 

Cons:

  1. Difficult to arrange - meaning there is a lot of prep that goes into it. For example, marketing a garage sale, putting up signs, arranging everything, pricing everything, etc. lots of time commitment with no guarantees.
  2. Huge time commitment.
  3. Harder to have a successful garage sale than you may think.

Craigslist

This is where I sold a couple of pieces. 

Pros:

  1. Has been a successful site for awhile now - lots of people know to look there. 
  2. Easy to post and then interested parties reach out to you. 

Side note: Also very useful for marketing your garage sale!

Cons:

  1. More susceptible to scams (Be very wary of this, watch out for people who want to wire you money, do cashier's check, etc.). 
  2. People seemed to be more flakey with this site in my experience (set-up times to come look at stuff, but would never show up, or reschedule three times, stuff like that). 

Facebook Marketplace

This is where I sold approximately 80-90% of my belongings.

Pros:

  1.  I had zero experiences of scams with this platform unlike my experience with Craigslist. 
  2. If you have the Facebook app on your phone, it is already built right into, so easy to check and respond to inquiries quickly. 
  3. People have to have a Facebook account to access, which makes it a little safer in my opinion because you can see their profile which helps with knowing who you’re dealing with. 

Side note: Another useful tool for marketing your garage sale if you decide to go that route! 

Cons: 

  1. People like to ask you questions that you already addressed in your description, but its only a minor inconvenience. Make sure to include as much information in your description as you can to avoid this as much as possible. 

Overall, I think we can all tell the real winner is Facebook Marketplace. Things sold like hot cakes through the Marketplace, often the same day or a few days later. Sometimes people would come from an hour or so away to buy something I got from Target, it was mind-boggling tbh. I got the most bang for my buck and my time was better spent through Facebook Marketplace, so I highly suggest you start your process there. 

Comment below any additional suggestions you may have that worked well for you!