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Yard Sales are the way to go if you are looking to make some extra cash! Before you decide to dig through that giant closet and garage, check out the tips below to better your chances at getting more money for you stuff!

1. Plan, Plan, Plan – Good planning is critical to yard sale success. Plan when and where you want to hold the yard sale. Plan how much you want to spend advertising your sale. Plan to buy supplies for pricing and displaying items. Good planning will take the chaos out of your sale.

2. Advertise Your Sale – Don’t be fooled into thinking a few signs hung on telephone poles and work of mouth will get traffic to your sale. Unless your “yard” is in plan view of a busy main road, you will need more than that to bring the people in. Serious yard salers plan their routes according to the ads in the paper. To be clear, those people are the ones you want at your sale. They come with cash and know what they want.

3. Price Everything – Not every buyer will be brave enough to ask the price of something. many times they will just walk on by. Therefore it is important to make sure every item for sale is clearly marked with a price.

4. Hang Clothing from Hangers – Although this takes some time, effort and a bit of cash on your part, it is well worth the bother. When customers see clothing and cloth items such as linens hung up nice and neat, they see them as more valuable and are willing to pay more. You can find clothing bars at home improvement stores. Even better, if you plan on having several yard sales, you can try to pick up a secondhand clothing rack from a store going out of business. Lastly, use nice and unbroken hangers.

 5. Expect Early Birds – No matter how strongly you emphasize “No Early Birds”, people will start showing up at your yard sale 30-60 minutes early probably just as you are setting up. They do this to buy up the best merchandise. Still you may feel disoriented by the fact that people are browsing your items before you have them all out and set up according to your well though out plan There are only two good ways ( and one really awful way) to deal with early birds. The first is start setting up an hour before your scheduled start time in order to get a jump ahead of them. Secondly, you can just deal with them as best as you can and make as much money as possible. I have actually made $50 or more before my yard sale even started. The worst thing you can do is stand your ground and refuse to deal with customers before your official start time.

6. Don’t Overprice – Lets face it, everyone thinks their stuff is the best stuff in the world. Generally other people do not agree. People who go to yard sales are there to find incredible bargains. If they wanted new and perfect stuff, they would go to the department store. They do not care if the blender was only used once or if a print was a limited edition. They are only interested in if they like it and if it is cheap.

If you ahve any other tips or tricks to having a successful ayrd sale, give us a shout back and fill us in!