How it All Started
Most people don’t know what the hell they want to do after high school. I was no different. But I always kind of knew that I didn’t want to work a desk job (I would find out later just how much I hated desk jobs). One day after school, during my sophomore year, I decided to Google “How to make money online”. It was a thought that sort of just popped into my head (I suppose all thoughts work this way, very strange things). I found a post that listed 10 or so things like making YouTube videos or starting a blog. However, only one thing really stood out to me, something called “reselling”. The name is pretty self explanatory. I decided to see if there were any tutorials on YouTube for how to do it (If you don’t know how to do something, I highly recommend looking for how to do it on YouTube. Free masters, teachers, and experts all one click away). The first videos I came across was a scrawny British guy with glasses. His name is Nic Hills and he is a retired police officer who decided to make a living selling used board games, toys, and other miscellaneous items on eBay. I was instantly fascinated. Here’s this nerdy looking guy (like myself) who makes enough money for himself, his wife, and his kid just by going to thrift stores (they call them charity shops in the UK) buying used items, and selling them on eBay for profit. I had always loved going to thrift stores and yard sales as a kid. It was time to get paid for doing something I enjoyed as a kid.
The first thrift store I went to was a Goodwill in a bad part of Phoenix, Arizona where me and my brother worked at the time. We went after work and I looked around the toy area for anything that seemed valuable. I found an old Star Wars puzzle from the 90’s and an unopened Harry Potter calendar from 2001. I thought I hit the jackpot. I had zero idea what I was doing. But I was obsessed, and I watched hours and hours of videos, slowly acquiring information on what to look for. For the rest of high school, I would go to thrift stores on weekends and I made an extra couple hundred dollars a month by selling games and toys on eBay. I began selling on Amazon and found out about the joys of multiple streams of income. I graduated in 2015 and got my own apartment a week after I turned 18, which was great but it also meant something not so great. Bills.
Reselling to Stay Afloat
One of my favorite Tony Robbins quotes is “If you want to take the island, burn your fucking boats”. I burned my fucking boats. I got my first apartment, without having any steady source of income. It was sink or swim. A week after moving into my apartment I got a job at Target to help pay the bills (although it didn’t quite cut it). I did the math and realized that I wouldn’t make enough money to pay rent and eat if I just had my income from Target. For the first time, reselling meant more than just having a little bit of extra spending money, it was the difference between having a roof over my head or being on the street. I began going thrift shopping a couple times a week and as the weeks went by, I got better. I was making an extra $500-$1500 a month and for the first time it occurred to me that I could make this a full time thing for myself (a thought that stayed burning inside me for years).
Months went by at Target and the longer I worked there, the more I wanted to dictate my own life. I hated the random schedule assigned to me. I hated the lack of upward mobility, the ceiling is 2 feet high and I felt 20-feet tall and needed to stretch. The closest thing to freedom was working in the backroom listening to audio books while daydreaming about having my own business. I would listen to motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and Les Brown while I asked myself how I could possibly make a decent living on my own, without working for someone else. Right before my 19th birthday I was given an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. I was offered to work a desk job for an oil company where I would be paid almost twice as much as I was at Target ($18 an hour).
Complacency Kills
“The tragedy of life is often not in our failure, but rather in our complacency; not in our doing too much, but rather in our doing too little; not in our living above our ability, but rather in our living below our capacities.”-Benjamin E. Mays. The new job working for the oil company paid me more than enough to pay my bills. So for months and months I stopped going to thrift stores and almost completely stopped reselling online. However, I could only lie to myself for so long. About 8 months in, I could feel my soul dying. Sitting at a desk all day was not the life for me, even if it allowed me to live comfortably. I started to plan my escape. I would spend all of my free time at work fantasizing about reselling full time, but more importantly I spent that time planning. My work notepad was filled with calculations for different possible outcomes and contingency plans. I was just about to quit and then…the company got bought out and they offered me a retention plan. If I would stay 6 more months, they would pay me $15,000. Now I would love to say that I refused it in order for my soul to be free those 6 months. But I stayed. That $15,000 would be used to buy inventory and would be my safety net.
I added men’s clothing to my repertoire and listed out all of the thrift stores near me. I endured the soul killing work of sitting in a cubicle, counting down the minutes, for those last 6 months. Then on May 1st, I was set free.
Planning is Good. Action is Required.
Four years after beginning reselling, I finally made the transition from “part-time” to “full-time”. I was fucking ecstatic. For the first time in my adult life I was able to structure my days how I wanted. I spent four hours in the mornings going to thrift stores, then at 1pm I would go workout, and from about 3pm to 7pm I would photograph and list the stuff that I had found that day. I got better as the weeks went on and by July I was making a full time living, selling mostly clothes. July is also where things started to go downhill. I needed a new car and so, overconfident in my abilities to earn, spent $7,000 of my retention check to buy a car. I didn’t take my time looking for one and it still pains me to say it, but I got ripped off.
If the car was the only hiccup, I probably would have been fine financially, but I’ve found that chaos almost never just comes once a year in life. It usually strikes twice. In August, my eBay account got completely shut down (that is another story for another day). Losing my ability to sell on eBay meant losing 80% of my income. I was devastated and more than that, I was lost. The one thing that I had been wanting to do for the last 4 years just got the rug pulled out from under it. I spent the next two months in a depressed state, doing my best to try to avoid the fact that my savings were being drained while I only made a few hundred dollars a month selling on Amazon (and Poshmark).
I had to face the facts. The facts were that I had less than $2,000 in my account and in order to survive I would have to get a “regular” job until I figured things out. I started applying to about a dozen different places and ended up getting a job at a law firm putting together paperwork. The real name of the law firm is irrelevant, so lets just call it Hell.
Escape From Hell
It only took a few days to hate working there and only a couple weeks to begin thinking about my escape. Working in Hell did one good thing for me, it fueled me. I had tasted freedom, and now deprived of it, I was starving. I went from doing something I genuinely enjoyed, to being yelled at by Satan (my boss) for being 15 minutes early. Yes for being early. I had to escape, but I had to be smart about it. Every single day I filled up pages of legal pads with different possible scenarios. I watched videos of successful resellers on my breaks (which I took liberally 5+ a day), and I learned new markets such as women’s clothing. On weekends I would spend hours at thrift stores and I built up my Poshmark inventory. In December I made a new eBay and slowly started to build that as well.
On February 26, 2019 I sent an email to my boss. It was two sentences. “I left my badge on my desk. I won’t be back”. I was free again, but this time would be different. I had to treat it like a real job, not just a hobby which meant working every day for at least 8 hours. I had to diversify in case of something happening to a a major stream of income again, so I listed on Poshmark, eBay, Mercari, and Amazon.
Over Half a Decade in the Making
By November 2020 I was making over $9,000 in sales a month. In March, sales for me started to slow down over 50% because of the coronavirus pandemic, but they have slowly been recovering. Unfortunately most thrift stores are still closed though, which has given me extra time to do things like workout, read, and reflect. Oh, and here’s a blog post.
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