De-Crapify

A few weeks ago, I was rummaging around in my closet looking for some old photo albums when I came across a large cardboard box with the letters PS2 written on it in huge letters. With a nostalgic smile, I popped open the box and sure enough, there was my old Playstation 2.

A lot of nice memories flooded over me: long nights playing Gran Turismo 3 and Grand Theft Auto 3 with my college friends, mostly. But as I looked at the games sitting there in the box with a thin layer of dust covering them, it occurred to me that the games had sat in my closet untouched for better than a year and I had no real interest in hooking it up and playing.

Instead, I took those games and sold them on eBay, netting me $300 in the process, money which is currently earning a good deal of interest for me as it sits there waiting on a rainy day. I did a similar thing shortly afterwards with my Magic: the Gathering cards from my high school days, which netted me several hundred dollars, and I followed this with a purging of some of my old hardback and trade paperback books that I won’t read again, netting me a few hundred dollars more. In short, I now have an extra thousand in the bank for a rainy day and a lot more space in my closet for other things that are important to me now.

It was really quite easy: I just went through my closet, realized I wouldn’t ever touch this stuff again and took it to eBay. Particularly good items to sell include DVDs, hardback and trade paperback books, video games, and pretty much anything collectible (except baseball cards - the market for these is pretty low and I discovered that my piles of 1986, 1987, and 1988 baseball cards were nearly worthless). If you’re not going to use or look at something in your closet ever again, now is probably the best possible time to liquidate it and put that money somewhere where it is working for you instead of building up dust in your closet.