Sunday, April 22, 2018

Flipping Experiment #2: Storage Locker - Month #1


So, I bought a storage locker at an online auction. I've wanted to do this for a while, but unfortunately Ottawa does not have a lot of them. I saw a few in the winter that I wanted but with the car being stored in the garage, I had nowhere to store the contents. Now that it is warm out, I was eager to buy one. This one was a 4x5 locker, which is pretty small as far as storage lockers go. I bought the locker for $326.29 (that is included all fees and taxes). I emptied the locker in three trips in the car, and stored it in all in my car. I slowly went through it, and managed to finish today. The contents were weird - it was all in bags (and bags inside bags inside bags). There was a lot of garbage stored away, including a ton of newspaper, and actual food (both canned goods and bags and bags of Halloween candy). There were probably over 100 candles, almost all of which had Value Village stickers on them. I threw out probably 25-30 bags of garbage, and I donated two car-fulls to Value Village. I am optimistic that I will make my money back, and I am hoping to double my investment. We will see...

April 22nd - Loose Change
Sold for: $50.00 Fees: $0.00
Sold for: $71.38 Fees: $8.48

This is not really a sale, but it's profit so I'm counting it. Inside the locker I found a lot of loose change, including a plastic bag filled with it (that promptly ripped and spilled all over the garage floor). There was $50 in loonies and toonies, which I set aside to use at garage sales this summer. Anything smaller than a loonie, I took to a Coinstar machine (dump your change in and a cashier gives you cash). The Coinstar has a 12% cost, so I had $71.30 in loose change, but I only walked away with $62.82, but still pretty good for free money. So, in total, in loose change alone I've made $112.82 - which is just over 1/3 of the cost of the locker. Off to a pretty good start, only 2/3 to go without anything being listed for sale yet!

The Numbers:
Initial Cost: $326.29 
Number of items sold in April: 1
Number of items sold overall: 1
Gross Profit for April: $121.38
Fees to eBay: $8.48
Net Profit for April: $112.82
Net Overall Profit: -$213.47

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