Part one can be found here- https://steemit.com/story/@sumuji/from-poor-and-jobless-to-running-my-own-business-part-1
So where was I? I was unemployed and then underemployed. Trying to suppliment my income while working retail for chicken feed. Being an 30 something year old adult with serious adult bills and not enough money to pay them. I started looking for ways of making money on the side. I stumbled upon some ideas that gave me a nice little boost to my earnings in one way or the other.
I left off Part 1 with me discovering the Perk app. It was the golden age for this app with it being totally passive and paying out very well, but like all good things...........After a few months of passively earning gift cards regularly, Perk finally does the inevitable. They reign in on how much they're paying out in the form of lowering how much each video gave points and also inserting an attention check. Everything would come to a stop until you cleared the attention check message. No more earning passively, well, you still could but nothing like it was before.
Even with the supplemental income I was unable to pay all of my bills and now one of my biggest side earners had starting paying out a fraction of what they were before. It was time to start looking for alternatives. Meanwhile, I was still looking for a job only there wasn't many openings at all for my experience and training. So I continued to do retail and Mechanical Turk on the side while trying to find a good source of income to add to it.
That came in the form of reselling. I had just read an article about how you could buy bargain basement priced stuff at flea markets, yard sales, Craigslist..Etc, then turn around and flip it for a nice profit. It was currently yard sale season so I thought I could give it a try.
This isn't as simple as it sounds. You need to have an idea of what something is worth and what someone is willing to pay for it. You can't waste your time on something to only make a dollar profit. You need to find someone selling something for practically nothing because they either don't know or don't care about the real value.
I decided to go visit some yard sales. My first buy was a TV set. The person was moving and the place they were moving to already has a bigger TV and pretty much just trying to get rid of it. I managed to beat people to this TV somehow and he was asking $50 for it. This was a 47" TV that was only a year and change old. I didn't even bother to haggle him down. SOLD! Later on I put this TV up on a few different sale places and sold it for $200. It was essentially my first flip sale.
I ended up picking up a few more items during my first yard sale run but they were quite a profitable. When I was starting I wasn't doing research or products. I was just using my judgement. Most of the time it was off a little bit in the beginning until I was able to get a plan going.
Alright, going to stop here. I don't want to write a book only to have it slip of the front page in 20 seconds with no viewers ;) I'll pick up where I left off soon. Still more parts to come.