Today was a tiring day for me, mostly because I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night, however, financially speaking things went pretty well today.
1.) Sourcing Discontinued Items
Although, I am trying to slow down my sourcing and focus more on listing, there were two stores that I still wanted to check out. Ace Hardware & The Home Depot
I was able to get around to all 3 Ace Hardware stores in town today but only scored big at one and then got 3 of one profitable item at another.
The discontinued item I scored the most on was only $4.99 at the store and when I checked it on eBay, it is selling for upwards of $50! There were only 3 of them so I made sure to grab them all.
I then happened upon another item that cost me $7 and sells for anywhere between $30 & $45 on eBay! I was able to get 5 of them and I think I will price them high and wait out the market as they are out of stock everywhere online and are getting harder to find in stores.
With those items, once they sell, at the lowest I should make at least $180 profit but will be trying to get closer to $200+
Not bad for spending an hour in the store. (I actually found them within the first 15 minutes but stayed longer to look through more stuff)
The other item I picked up was a box of respiratory masks that I assume are selling online well because of the different sicknesses going around. If I ship those in to Amazon, I can make about $10 profit on each of the 3 boxes I picked up and if I sell them on eBay I might be able to make a little more.
FUN FACT: There are lots of discontinued items, especially in the Health & Beauty category that a lot of people are willing to pay a premium for because they like them so much. For example, I purchased a perfume that was discontinued about 10 months ago that was worth $100 and now it isn’t selling for much less than $200. Not bad to double my investment in a year with discontinued products!
2.) More Side Gig Income
I did take some time in between sourcing at different stores to do a couple grocery deliveries with Instacart. I also spent a couple hours this evening delivering for UberEats since they were running a $2 bonus per delivery promotion. I also was able to do one delivery for Postmates, which I have not done many deliveries on recently.
On Instacart, I did two orders and spent the total time of 1 hr and 29 minutes completing those orders. For those, I earned $38.01
Postmates was just one delivery which took me 18 minutes and I made $8.04. It was really close to the restaurant but they were running a $5 per delivery promotion. I did not get a tip on that order but sometimes people don’t tip on the app until the next day.
For UberEats, I was online for 2 hrs and 40 minutes and I completed 4 deliveries in this time. (I had quite a bit of down time with no orders) In total, I earned $39.08 on those deliveries.
To break it down for you, I earned $23.08 from the delivery fees and promotions and I earned $16.00 from 3 people who tipped me.
The totals for all the deliveries I did today comes out to $85.16 for 4 hrs and 45 minutes of work. Take off about $8 for gas and I am left making around $17 an hour.
Not bad for working on my own time! WIN
3.) Increased My Credit Limit on Two Cards
While this doesn’t have a direct affect on my finances, it does help my credit score which affects a few areas of my finances.
Every few months or so I go through and try and increase my limits on a couple of my cards and today I was able to increase 2 of them up to $5,000 each.
Doing this helps your credit score as it lowers your debt to income ratio and also shows the credit bureaus that they trust you with more credit.
The two cards I did this one are cards that I rarely, if ever use and they are always paid off right away so it is definitely a WIN
4.) A Couple More Dropshipping Sales
If you haven’t noticed by now, my dropshipping sales tend to happen on a pretty consistent basis.
Although I don’t make a lot, maybe $5 profit per item, it is something that once it is set up, takes very little time to manage and is a great source of income.
Yesterday I sold another lava lamp and another set of landscaping lights.
For something that takes so little time, I consider this to be a big WIN!
LESSON FROM TODAY: Stay consistent, even when you are down/tired/not having the best day. It would have been very easy for me to just give up and nap most of the day because I was tired, but instead, I pushed through and stayed focused on doing things that impacted my finances.
I do have to admit, I have not been able to meet my challenge to myself to list 10 items a day, but since my wife will be gone for the weekend, I am going to try to focus on still listing a total of 60 items by the time Monday comes around. I am at 15 right now so wish me luck!
What are some things that distract you from your financial goals? What do you do to stay on track?
If you have any financial WINS, I would love to hear from you!
