Active Investing Blog

A challenge of starting with nothing and turning it into $1,000,000 in my spare time.

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Starting On The Right Foot

Since I decided to start with nothing, I had to come up with a way to start making money without expending any money right away. I had a couple of choices here. I could find stuff for free and sell it or I could take a page out of my old challenge and place items up for sale that I didn't actually purchase, but know I can purchase if they end up selling. While I plan to utilize both strategies, I started off by placing a couple of auctions with items I knew I could get at a local hobby shop.

While there are expenses for placing items on eBay, I could still get away with this due to the float in time before I actually had to pay. That is, even though there is a cost, I don't have to pay that cost until the bill comes which gives me a window of about a month to earn enough to cover the bill before it comes. Not something that I would normally want to do, but when you're starting our with $0 you have to be a little creative in making things happen.

I started off with a Coca Cola world cup set. I had listed this a couple of times in the other challenge and it hadn't sold, but with world cup news now getting more air time, I thought it would be worth a try again.

I sold a set today. I have another one still available and I hope it will sell too. I only listed 2 sets because the store has 4 full sets available and I want to make sure that i can get hold of them if they sell. I will go down there today to pick up the set that sold and make sure there are still 3 sets available.

In addition to the coca cola set, I listed a Star Wars card set. I sold this set a number of times in the last challenge so I figured I should keep a good thing going. Again, there is no cost to me unless the set sells and then I can pick it up for $2.50.

The last thing I put up were sets of packaging for Star Wars figures. This was completely free - it's just packaging, but I have learned from past experience that for collectors anything has a chance to sell. If it doesn't, I'm only out the cost of listing the item for sale.

To place the items on ebay cost $1.35. The cost of the Coca Cola pin set to me is $20.00. paypal fees and ebay end of auction fees came to $3.92 and the set sold for $49.95. That puts me up $24.68 after deducting all expenses and means I now have a cushion to make this challenge work.

Previous Total: $0.00

Current Total: $24.68

Inventory: none

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