Buy Low Sell High: A Place to Start

Here's a random video about flipping stuff for some profit.  If you don't have a specialized skill to create your own job, or if you're starting on a real tight budget, buying and selling is a good way to make some cash fairly quick.

As I've written in earlier posts, there are at least 20 million unemployed and underemployed people in the U.S. right now.  There are tens of millions more who could use some extra cash.  Buying and selling stuff is a great place to start.  I've done it at various levels before. 

In fact my first business, in second grade, was selling pieces of Magic Rub erasers.  These gray erasers worked much better than the red ones, and we all wanted them.  Then I found out my dad was a draftsman, and used Magic Rub erasers at work.  He gave me a couple.  I used an thin piece of metal called an eraser shield to cut each eraser into about 8 pieces, and I sold each piece for 10 cents to my classmates.  Hey, we all start somewhere.

In today's highly connected, internet and mobile phone enabled world, there are all kinds of places to buy stuff cheap and many great ways to resell it for a profit.  There's one key to this, you have to have an idea what each item will actually sell for.  You may have personal experience with certain items, like antiques or vintage video games or whatever.  Or you can just use your phone to look up items on Ebay or Amazon to get an idea.  Whatever works.

Then you have to have a way to sell the items.  You can sell to collectors.  You can sell at flea markets or swap meets.  You can sell on Ebay or Amazon.  You can sell on Craigslist or one of the local sales apps.  You can sell at garage or yard sales.  You can sell at consignment shops.  My advice is to keep all options open for selling items.  Sell the better items for higher dollar amounts to collectors or on Ebay or to consignment shops.  You'll wind up with leftover stuff.  That's what you sell on Craigslist, at the swap meet, or at a garage sale. 

I'm going to get this blog going with several posts about many different ways and places to find bargains.  After all those posts, I'll bookend this section with more ideas about how to sell different items.  Good luck on your own efforts to Buy Low and Sell High.

How am I trying to start a business with literally no money?

For a variety of reasons, I can't get hired for even a lame job here in North Carolina.  Most people here give me the standard advice: "Tweak your resume' and keep trying."  But the longtime Californian in me says, "Screw that, I'll create my own job."

Right now I'm writing and self-publishing a book about my adventures in the early days of BMX freestyle in the 80's and 90's.  I stumbled into the industry, and saw a lot of really cool things happen firsthand.  After some trial and error, I decided to publish my "book" myself, laid out like a big zine.  It's just going to be a D-ring binder with pages I write and layout myself, and copy and put together myself.  Zines (pronounced zeens) were small, photo copied, self-published booklets we made to write about our friends and ideas in the 80's and 90's.  Basically, it's what bloggers did before blogs.  So I had the idea to do that, just on a bigger scale.  I'm writing 20 pages at a time, and using the orders I get on my Go Fund Me crowdfunding page to actually fund it.  Using advance orders to fund a business is an idea I got from a book called No Cash, No Fear, which it a good read for entrepreneurs.  Basically, today's crowdfunding sites are a high tech way to do that much easier.

Another way to start a business with no money at all is to provide a service and charge for that.  So how am I doing?  I'm finishing the first 20 page section of the book today, and I have 2 orders so far.  OK, a few more orders would be better, but it's a start.  I'm adding lots of goodies and giving the book a real hand-made feel, so hopefully it will do better once a few copies are out there and words gets around.  I'm also promoting it with my blog on the same subject.

Here's my BMX blog, Freestyle BMX Tales, with a link to the Go Fund Me Page at the bottom.

Taking Stock Of What You Have To Work With

This clip is from some footage I shot at the 2-Hip Mission Trails King of Dirt contest, outside San Diego, California in 1991.  The sport of BMX was "dead" at the time, the big bike companies were focusing their efforts on mountain bikes.  We were in the grips of the long, "double dip" recession of the early 1990's.  Yet this contest, the first true Huckfest in my opinion, changed the way we looked at bike riding.  History was made while most of the world was looking elsewhere. I edited this clip with my camera and a VCR for the S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer.

Like tens of millions of other people in the U.S. right now, I don't have a "real" job.  I'm fifty years old and living with my mom.  Yes, I know how pathetic that is.  My last (of many) career was as a taxi driver.  I just can't make money doing that, the industry went downhill because of computer dispatching in the early 2000's, and then The Great Recession, and then because of services like Uber and Lyft. 

After several years of taxi driving, I wound up homeless in Southern California in 2007, and, after a year on the streets, I called my family, and they flew me to North Carolina.  I got here in November 2008, as the global economy was crashing.  I'd never lived here before.  My parents and sister's family just wound up here.  I haven't had a real job since.  I drove a taxi for a year, and quit when my dad had a massive stroke because I wasn't making any money at it and I wanted to spend more time with him those last few months.

So, here I am in late 2016, taking stock of my options.  I can't get hired for an entry level job, probably because of my age, weight (about 350), or sketchy work history.  I'm not sure.  I've written for magazines, worked on the crews of TV shows, and self-produced videos.  But none of that will get me a good paying job here.  The job market is terrible here in Central North Carolina.  A couple of weeks ago a Cheesecake Factory restaurant opened in nearby Greensboro, and 7500 people applied for the 255 jobs.  That's insane.

Now, most of those 7500 people probably went home, spruced up their resume' yet again, and kept looking through the job websites.  Hey, if you have skills that are in demand, that's great.  But the reality is, tens of millions of people in the U.S. can't find a good paying job.  I'm one of them.  But no one is really creating millions of good paying jobs.  The more I look into the job issue right now, the more I think millions of us will have to create our own jobs.  So that's what I'm doing.

The first step is taking stock of my current resources.  Despite my weight, I'm reasonably healthy, but in no shape to do physical labor.  So that's out.  I'm living for free, though I help my elderly mom out with some day to day tasks.  But she's paying the bills, which is something I hear about over and over every day.  But I have a roof over my head, and a really old and really slow, but functional, laptop.  In my crazy life, I've discovered that I'm a writer and creative guy at heart.  That doesn't sound like much, but lots of people haven't found their true place in the world.  I know that writing is what I am here on Earth to do.  So that's good.

But writing as an industry has changed dramatically since I got my first magazine job 30 years ago.  I've been blogging and self-educating myself for the past several years, but not making any money.  In today's tech heavy world, writers need to create their own following and then build a business around that following.  My following at this point is about 250 old school BMX riders who are my Facebook friends. 

So far I have a computer, experience as a writer, and a small following of guys (and a few gals) who were into BMX freestyle in the 1980's and 90's.  The thing that really tips the scale for me is that I have literally hundreds of stories from that era, because I managed to break into the industry, and be in the midst of it all. 

Now, here's the conflict.  I'm really into working on, and writing about, the current jobs issue and where our society is going.  That's what this blog is all about.  But I don't have a following in this area yet.  The thing about writing today is that it's easy to put work out for the world to see it on the internet.  But making money is a whole different game.  Most of the 200 million or so blogs out there do not make money.  Newspapers and magazines have drastically cut back their staffs over the last 20 years.  So how do I make money?

I've been struggling with this for a long time.  It finally dawned on me last week that I really need to put everything I remember from those early BMX days into a book.  And self-publish it.  And I have to do it starting with literally not a dime to my name.  We all have our challenges, these are mine.

So I started a Go Fund Me page as a way to pre-order the book.  I've decided to go with my DIY roots and make it a weird, but hopefully cool, kind of book.  I'm writing stories and thoughts, laying them out, old school zine style, on 8 1/2" X 11" sheets of paper, and putting them into a simple D-ring binder with a home made insert for the cover.  It sounds cheesy.  But it's something I know I can do as soon as I start getting orders and get it written.  And I can do any kind of black & white layout I want, which I can't do if I use a self-publishing service.  So that's where I'm at right now.  Here's the link to my Go Fund Me page, if you want to check it out. 

So... what resources do you have that you could use to start creating your job?