Life Lessons from an Ordinary Garage Sale
Posted under: Garage sales are a popular way of getting rid of useless household items while earning a few hundred dollars, depending on the items for sale. They’re also a good way of teaching children the basics of finances while enforcing a few lessons for the parents as well.
In most garage sales, profits can be as high as 500 dollars or as low as 12 dollars. In most cases, selling off old toys and books will net a family around 50 to 100 dollars. This isn’t a bad amount for a few days of selling old junk, but compared to brand new items, this amount is sorely lacking. Kids can therefore be taught that for a person to earn a decent amount of money, he first needs to sell something that’s worth selling in the first place.
It’s not unusually to sell items that were only used once or twice before being stashed away in the attic or garage. A dress that’s two sizes too small, a punch bowl that was given as last- minute gift, a special vacuum cleaner that ended up being more trouble that it was worth. Garage sales are a good way of gathering all of these useless junk as a way to tell the kids that not everything in the world is actually worth owning.
This can be a good realization for the parents that they might actually be spending too much on items that aren’t worth anything. Sure, it can feel great buying stuff just because they have the money to do so, but at the end of the day, these items become reminders of a consumerist society that encourages spending on poor quality items.