realtime Asked July 2016
Has anyone had success selling your parents' stuff on Ebay or Etsy?
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Today the air condition/heating fellow came by to service both houses. He saw an old manual drill on my Dad's work bench and asked if he could buy it for $10... he said he's been looking for something like that for years, as he found the newer cordless battery drills would die out too quickly for him. I quickly said yes, as this fellow was one of the very few people my parents would let into the house, he was so very patient with them over the past decade as my parents would both hover over him while worked :)
I've been trying to downsize myself and having no luck on e-bay and very little on craigs list or facebook garage sales. Yard sales are a waste of time. I have cabinets full of Limoge and very old cut glass, sterling silver, limited edition lithographs (also antique quilts) but can't sell anything! The only thing I have a little bit of luck with is furniture, but you have to sell it cheap. Everyone wants news stuff, and gen ex and millennials don't want any "keepsakes".
It breaks my heart to get rid of things that 10 years ago were worth 10x as much.
Example, I like to keep paperclips easily accessible and had them in tin candy cans, so I donated those tin cans as there was no sentimental value, and used small bowls from various china sets my Mom had for the paperclips. Now I can remember the china sets without needing to keep every individual piece of china [would have been packed into a box in the basement].
Wish I could have passed on the items to relatives, but in my case I am an only child who never had children. The cousins whom I am closes to also never had any children and they were up to their eyeballs with their own parent's household goods.
All the more reason for me to start doing more of my own downsizing.
Also, I know that there are dealers who will come to your home to assess your stuff. Some dealers focus on things like old records or collectibles.
You can always call them to see if they are interested.
Once you get an idea of the real value you might consider Craigslist. If you sell local you don't have to worry about packing and breakage of fragile things. You can set your own terms as to when and where to make the sale, preferably in a public place with a friend for company just to be safe. I have sold quite a few things this way, insisting they pick the items up at my office.
Ebay can be quite time consuming if you get a lot of questions from buyers. Also if anything arrives broken you have to refund the money as well as any shipping costs. The seller takes the risk here.
You never know what people want to buy. Unless they are rare, seek to sell your items for about 25% of what they originally cost. There isn't much of a marketplace for certain goods because lifestyles have changed and people dine more casually these days so china and fine crystal doesn't have the audience it used to have.
But you never know--I know a man who uses license plates to make art pieces. A friend of mine threw away two decades of plates not knowing that this man would have valued them because they are hard to get--most states today now require you to turn in your plates. So, you never know--one man's junk is another man's treasure.
Long story short - I sold them on ebay for a total of $735. YES - $735 for probably 40 post cards!!! I purchased my folks a big flat screen TV AND paid for several months of cable for them for the new place.
After that unbelievable sale - Dad took me aside and showed me some old framed feather pictures from Mexico. He said "Your brother wants these. Are they worth anything on that computer thing like the post cards?" I told him maybe...he handed them to me....LOLOLOL.
GOOD LUCK!!!
When a plumber was at my parents house doing repair work, he fell in love with an antique curved glass china cabinet. It was refreshing to see a young fellow have such appreciation for such an item. I sold the cabinet to him real cheap as I wanted it to go to a good home :) Of course I held my breathe as he and his work buddy carried it down the stairs as those cabinets can twist and break. Whew. It made it in one piece.
So I decided the fastest way to get all this stuff out of my house [my family room and dining room were looking like a flea market] was to donate all the items to various charitable outlets. That way my Dad would have a really nice deduction come income tax time :)
Salvation Army will come this Thursday to get what is left of my parents furniture... if I had known how easy it was to go on-line at the Salvation Army and check off what furniture, etc. and to pick a pickup date, I would have done this months ago [slapping forehead].