No Limits Ladies.com

We’ve all heard the story about the person who found a fifty cent item at a yard sale and turned it into thousands of dollars on eBay (like those groaners on Antique Roadshow where some sweet ol’ grandma sold a Picasso for the equivalent of a cup of coffee).

The thing is… in my neighborhood, the yard sales are pretty picked over (especially by the time I get up – which isn’t early). The sellers are savvy. The professional buyers show up the night before. Challenging for the amateur.

So what’s a girl to do?

Look somewhere else. S, one of our regular readers (in the future, I’ll be picking S’s brain about buying discounted paper), suggests looking at self-storage unit sales.

You see, some people put their things in self-storage and then never take them back out again. Perhaps they’re out of the country for good (like my newly married sister is – did I mention that I changed her diapers? Sigh…). They stop paying for the rental space, three or four months pass, and then…

Their items get auctioned off.

Think of what people pay for storage for. The contents are either sentimental (not a buy and many self storage operators don’t sell items like photographs and letters) or semi-valuable.

How to find self-storage auctions? There are sites and newsletters (Google for your area) but it is probably just as easy to phone up or drop by your local self-storage businesses.