Adventures on Craigslist

Bought or sold anything good on Craigslist lately? If not, you are missing out! A friend of mine recently blogged about the beautiful dining room table and chairs set that she got for $75. They were in perfect condition, and the chairs were the exact style she had been looking for. She spent a great deal of time watching the postings on Craiglist for just the perfect set to come up, and was getting discouraged because so many sets were out of her price range, but the moral of her story (and the moral of the Craigslist story in general) is that patience pays off.

In my own experience, I have found that the truly good stuff gets snatched up pretty quickly, so if you really want something, hit that refresh button every time you walk past the computer. A few years ago, we needed a better dresser for my son's room. After about a dozen years, his WalMart particleboard special was falling to pieces (imagine that). My budget was not very much; if I bought something new I would have had to settle for another particleboard one, and I wanted something better. So, I camped out on Craigslist and finally found a large oak dresser that I wanted. I was the first person to call, and 30 minutes later, we had driven out to take a look. It was perfect, large with lots of storage, and very sturdy. $50 later, we loaded it into our Scion xB (still not sure how it fit in there) and took it home. A couple of years later, we needed to get rid of the dresser, as our son had inherited a waterbed with drawers in the pedestal and he no longer had need or room for the dresser. I posted it on Craigslist and it was gone within a day, for $25 more than I had paid for it in the first place!

I also sold our 1992 Mazda Protege on Craigslist when we bought a new car 3 years ago and the dealer wouldn't even give us the token $500 trade-in. Sure, it wasn't much to look at (the paint was peeling in several places) and the seatbelt sensor had a short and often beeped even when your seatbelt was on, but it ran great and was relatively low miles for a 14-year-old car and we included a set of studded snow tires on separate rims. I had at least 15 interested buyers lined up. The first person who saw it handed me $750 cash and drove it home!

It's also worth mentioning that you do need to be careful. As a buyer, be sure you know where you are going to meet the seller. There are some deals I've passed up because I didn't know the area the seller was in. As a seller, you need to list as little identifying information in your ad as possible. Give out your phone number or address only to those persons that seem to be seriously interested. There is risk involved, but for the savvy Craigslister, the bargains abound!

What are your favorite Craigslist finds? Got any great stores about an item you've sold?

Buying Used on Amazon.com

My hubby has a DVD habit. A huuuuuuge DVD habit. As in, "Run for your lives, the DVDs are about to take over the entire family room!" It makes me crazy every time another DVD finds its way into our home. I long ago admitted defeat; he uses his own personal spending money on them, so I really can't tell him to stop buying them.

At least he's a bargain shopper. He only buys new releases the first week of release when they are on sale. He compares prices between Target, Best Buy, and amazon.com (especially if he can get free Super Saver shipping). For older DVDs, he buys a lot of them via the amazon.com used marketplace. Prices range from one cent (seriously) to whatever the seller thinks the market can bear, plus a fixed $2.98 shipping fee. The shipping fee is per title, and sellers are not allowed to charge a combined shipping charge if you buy more than one item from the same seller. My hubby's rule for buying a used DVD this way is to not pay more than about $5 or $6, including shipping. He's gotten many titles for only a penny (and still, in my opinion, paid too much).

I have also started checking out the used marketplace to pick up some older books. The standard shipping price for books is $3.99, and, like DVDs, the prices for the books themselves start at 0.01 and go up, depending on condition, popularity, and availability.

So, while checking out a book or DVD from a library would be the best frugal option, if it is a movie or a book that you've just gotta have, buying used on amazon is definitely worth a try.

More Secondhand Stuff

Here are some of our more recent secondhand finds to inspire your own bargain hunting.

A pair of Abercrombie & Fitch jeans, bought for my 16-year-old son at Plato's Closet for $22.00. Considering that Abercrombie & Fitch jeans start at $80 in the stores, I consider this a major score.

We borrowed this 20-gallon aquarium from some friends who no longer had their snake. That, and the driftwood log (partially obscured by the plant on the right) are on permanent loan to us until they need it back or until we decide to get a tall aquarium for Morty, our gecko, who is sleeping in the fake foliage on the left.

Morty himself is another story in frugality. While he was the most expensive gecko at the store ($49), he was the only gecko there that does not require live crickets for meals. The small bottle of crested gecko diet mix in the lower left corner of the picture will make enough "gecko mush" to feed the Morstser for about 4 months, and cost us $8, saving both the $2 per batch of crickets and the time running back and forth to Petco every other day.

My 8th grader needed a Texas Instruments graphing calculator for school. They run about $99 in the store, or close to $110 after our lovely 9.5% sales tax. I found this gently used one on eBay (it has the name of a previous owner engraved on the back) for $65, which included free shipping.

What are some of your most recent secondhand finds? Where do you find them?

My Savvy Teen Shopper

One thing I haven't figured out how to do yet is to stop my boys from growing and needing new clothes. Believe me, I've tried, but they just keep growing. My oldest, who is almost 16, recently told me he had outgrown all his shorts as well as his dress shirt that he wears to youth dances at our church.

So, we went shopping. I suggested we try Ross (no luck) and Plato's Closet, which specializes in buying and selling gently-used name-brand clothing, mostly for teens. We hit the jackpot at Plato's, finding 2 pairs of shorts and a shirt for $30.

These shorts look to be brand new (still had tags), and were only $10.

These shorts are from Foot Locker (so the tag says) and were only $8.

This dress shirt was only $12.00. I figure we would have spent at least twice what we did, if not three times, if we had tried to buy the same brands and/or quality at a regular retail store. He was thrilled with his finds and declared that Plato's Closet is now his third favorite store. That's high praise from someone whose #1 store is GameStop (where he buys and sells used games--I've obviously taught him right) and Games Workshop.

How to Get a $50 Video Game for $1.08

My 12-year-old has been anxiously awaiting the release of Animal Crossing City Folk for months now, and dutifully saving his allowance and his chore money. On Saturday he put down a $5 deposit at GameStop to ensure that he would get a copy, and today when we went to pick it up, he decided to trade in some old games that no longer get played. We had a coupon good for an additional 10% trade-in value and we also got another 10% extra trade-in value for belonging to their rewards program. He traded in 2 Wii games, 1 Nintendo DS game, and 5 GameCube games and ended up getting $3.92 credit on the rewards card, making his total out-of-pocket cost $1.08. Not bad!

My boys love going to GameStop, both for buying and selling games. They will very often buy a used title, which can save 10 to 20% or more. And, depending on the game, they give very generous trade-ins. We got almost $20 for one of the Wii games--which offset the 35 cents we got for one of the GameCube games. Quite honestly, though, once the games stop being played, you might as well get what you can for them.

While I am not a big fan of video games in general, I AM a fan of teaching my boys to budget and save for what they want, and then find ways to make their out-of-pocket costs as minimal as possible.