Issue #115

I’m back into thrifting and whilst it feels like a regular issue, there’s a lot happening.

We’ve got Lifeline pickups that are turning $2 into $100, a Skylanders pick up for $140 that’s worth close to $1,000, the Goosebumps Whatnot show going live tonight plus a quick update below about the upcoming greatest flip of all time.

My biggest flip thus far has been $60 into $1,600. The flip I’ll be talking to you about in August/September, which has taken up a lot more of my time is going to blow that out of the water. You know I can’t say much, but here’s something I haven’t talked about yet.

The shipping fee alone is $1,000. Not even joking.

That’s all I’m going to say, let’s get into what happened this week.

Mat.

In This Issue

• What I Bought

• What I Sold

• Goosebumps Update

• Official Flip Weekly Podcast

• Win a Free $200 Mystery Box

• Flip Weekly on Social Media

• 100% Free Resources to Help You

What I Bought

One of my favorite things to pickup from thrift stores are foreign items that are worth a lot of money. Staff don’t take the time to learn what they are so you end up with situations like the below. Priced at just $2 each yet worth hundreds.

They’re models of, I guess, vehicles from a Japanese TV series called Crush Gear Turbo. They come as individual pieces and you’re supposed to put them together along with stickers and a battery powered motor. Something like that. I don’t buy these sorts of sets all the time, there’s a few boxes that were ticked.

1. Copyright date said 2002 so it’s old.

2. A single box was opened, the contents inside were sealed. I would not deal with these if the contents were loose.

3. Bandai is a good brand.

4. Foreign language items can be good resell items because staff give up on them.

5. People collect this weird anime/gaming/Japanese stuff.

Once I opened a box and saw everything was still sealed it was worth buying them all, especially when they’re just $2. We have very few Active and Sold Listings on eBay. The closest Active Listing is an alternate colour of this very model.

There’s only 1 on eBay of our version and its sold for close to $100.

We’ll come back to these models, check out What I Sold further below to see what happened with them.

Next, we’re back on the Facebook Marketplace deals and boy oh boy did we score big this week. This is exactly why you should join your local suburbs Buy, Swap and Sell pages.

Just like the majority of people who have jobs, I had no idea what to look for when it comes to Skylanders. I know the basics: they’re action figures connected to the video game and some people collect them. I had always thought majority were worthless (which is accurate) but when I saw this bundle I thought I could make some money.

The very first thing I comped up was the actual storage container. One of the most overlooked things are items designed to hold expensive stuff. Whether it’s Nintendo storage cases, luxury brand boxes, or in this case the Skylanders Trap Team chest.

This isn’t like the plastic Skylanders storage you see in every thrift store that’s hideously overpriced.

The box holds 38 Skylanders “Trap Team“ crystals. Rare items in the game. If they’re included, you can pretty much double your asking price.

I can see in the Marketplace listing at least 14 crystals.

So we have the box, the crystals plus 91 of the figures. This is surely going to be double, if not triple my money.

I pull the trigger, it’s mine.

It’s a bit of a slog to go through them, I’m using Google Lens to identify each item and then match it up with its card. Anything over $50 goes to the left, anything under goes to the right to be sold in a bulk deal.

Of the 91 figures, majority were not worth dealing with individually. Most were worth around $5-$10 with a couple going up to $25-$30 but I left them in the bundle as a way to attract sellers when it’s offloaded.

I listed them up on Marketplace for $100 and got a very quick sale. Now all I have left are items worth over $50 and I’m just $40 from breaking even.

Here are the valuable items along with my post-it notes of values.

Some of these items are just crazy money for what they are. The bulk of the value comes from the storage chest plus the guy with wings on the far left. Here’s a quick breakdown:

When I picked this up I didn’t think it was a home run, and I’m not sure if $140 > $920 is considered a home run, but either way it’s a nice multiplier. If you go down to What I Sold you’ll see that I’ve already made my money back. You’ll also see the crazy prices people pay for what appears to be a chunk of plastic.

Now in terms of what to look out for with Skylanders… after this deal I’m still not entirely sure. Every figure I picked up that I thought looked valuable turned out to be worthless. If there’s 1 takeaway I’d say the big IP crossovers seem to be worth picking up (Bowser, Crash Bandicoot) and if you can find multiple figures that look like they belong together you could bundle them.

That’s what happened with the Light Element Expansion, it’s made up of the figure, plus a crystal, plus some other random bit of plastic. I’ll show you below.

Apart from that, the storage box with the crystals is valuable and if you see it at a garage sale, always buy it - you never know, you might get one of the ultra rare crystals worth $1,000+.

Since this deal I’ve found boxes of Skylanders in a Save the Children’s Op Shop for $3 a piece. The first thing I looked for were the crystals. I think in the future that’s what I’m going to rely on when it comes to Skylanders. If it looks like a fancy key, buy it.

Moving on, I’ve known for a while that Bop-It’s are worth picking up. Heck, I sold the McDonald’s miniature version years back for $25. There’s surprisingly a collectors market and you’ll know I’ve been picking up all of the odd variants over the past year or so. This week, we found the Bop-It Extreme 2 Hot Pink edition.

Like a huge majority of niches, any wacky variant is going to have less supply than the regular one and if people collect these things, the demand will be high.

The sell through rate is sitting at 142% and with none available locally, we can add on our Australia tax.

I think if we ask for $99.95 we’ll be able to get it. Some of these people take Bop It collecting to a whole nother level.

People really do collect anything these days.

A few other things I picked up this week:

Vintage Bananas in Pyjamas goes really hard.

I’ve never found Holly Hobbie before. This is a lunchbox which seems to be missing the strap. The views on Facebook are incredible.

The Bananas in Pyjamas lunchbox is such a cool find I couldn’t leave it behind even though it doesn’t cross our $100 minimum threshold.

$20 at Lifeline. I’ll buy any mainstream sports jersey providing its around this mark. Even if it’s generic you can offload them for at least $50. This was a South Sydney Rabbitohs 2025 home jersey. One of the most common, but given it’s over $100 in-store and I’m offering it for $50 on Marketplace I know it will sell quickly.

I’ll try and be as open as I can be when describing this. This is 2 books within a slipcase. It’s called the “Encyclopedia of Whole Food Medicine” and describes itself as a “Farmacist Desk Reference“.

If you’re wondering… Mat, that’s not how you spell pharmacist… congratulations on not getting your medical advice from Facebook.

This book appears to be a whole lot of medical advice from people who can’t call themselves doctors or pharmacists. The “encyclopedia” opens with:

Look, I’m just your standard ignorant Aussie idiot, but this book appears to be filled with misinformation, dangerous health advice and just full on nonsense. Surrounding the entire slipcase are quotes from famous historical figures used to justify the books gibberish.

For every claim, the book cites no sources. We have a mixture of real facts intertwined between outrageous claims to lend itself to being an accurate source of information.

And look, I’m not a conspiracy theorist but has Don Tolman ever visited Belanglo?

Anyway, grifters are gonna grift so the book is expensive. You can buy the digital copy on his website for $99 (seriously) or you can head to eBay for a physical copy. The sell through rate is smack bang on 100% so people are buying this. We have 9 active, 9 sold.

With the high sell through rate, sale price and the fact the auction had plenty of bids made me pull the trigger. It’ll be expensive to ship but we should be able to turn $9 into $200 quite quickly.

What I Sold

I started off listing just 1 of the Crush Gear Turbo models for $99.95.

It sold in 2 hours. This got me excited. I decided to list the second one for $199.95.

It sold in 48 hours.

We still have 1 remaining but unfortunately I opened it up and it was missing 1 packet of gears. Damn, I could have tried for $299.95. Instead, we have to settle for $79.95. If it sells, it would be $6 into $379.85. At the moment it’s $4 into $299.90. Thanks Lifeline!

I was able to get rid of the under $50 Skylanders figures very quickly.

Somebody came and picked them up pretty much as soon as I listed them on Marketplace. None they’re gone and I’ve gotten most of my money back I can focus on the moneymakers.

Another Street Sharks is out the door via Facebook.

People have been flirting with the low value Sharks, we’ve still got the most expensive one remaining at over $400 (the hand puppet).

The jersey sold within 24 hours as expected.

We had our first over $50 Skylanders sale.

That’s right, this 2 inch bit of plastic sold in less than 24 hours for $69.95. The crystals are were it’s at, when you find bulk Skylanders, look for the funny looking keys.

This was from a small Gamecube bundle deal. I got 5 games for $50 from just up the road. It was the first time I had ever secured Gamecube via Marketplace. There were a few good games that we made a profit but Crash Nitro Kart selling for just $35 doesn’t exactly get me excited.

Speaking of retro games that aren’t worth your time, we had WCW/NWO going out the door. If I found these in an op shop I wouldn’t bother picking them up, they take forever to sell and you barely make any money.

Goosebumps Update

The Goosebumps Whatnot auction is tonight! 23rd of April, 7pm. Click here to bookmark the show.

How’d we get here? Let’s go back to the beginning of last week:

Here’s something I didn’t expect to happen.

So I got an update from Mitchell from Retro Rescuers about the status of the parcel:

Mitch attached an email from Australia Post.

That’s weird, why is the recipient being updated more than me? Why is it saying that the parcel was returned on the request of the sender when I had done no such thing?

Then I remember… I didn’t put a return label on the box. I check the new tracking number - a number that was given to Mitchell but not me. It says it was delivered. Not to me, but to a suburb I used to live in. Oh crap.

Australia Post has sent the huge box of Goosebumps stuff to my old address. Why? No idea. Either way, I need to go out and try and get it.

No time to reminisce about how the house has changed, I trek out and park in the visitor parking. I see my old garage door is open with a car inside but I ignore it and go straight for the letterbox. Maybe I can get the Australia Post “We missed you“ leaflet and that’ll be it.

Nope. Letterbox is locked.

Let’s go and knock on the door. We need this back. I get to the gate and immediately hear barking.

“Sorry! I’ll wait here“

An awkward wait whilst the owner walks out.

“Are you okay?“

“Yeah, hi, sorry, I used to live here…“

She perks up. “Mathew?“

From there I get a massive sense of relief. The box is just inside the door, we’ve secured it.

“I was thinking I have no idea how to contact this guy“ she told me as she was carrying the massive 15kg box out. I would have helped her but her dog was super keen on what felt like searching my neck for vulnerabilities.

I get the box back and its seen better days. The box feels like its lost all its integrity and there’s no way it’ll survive another trip back to Melbourne.

A decision is made to repack the contents in Aus Post boxes. We can’t afford any more delays.

It’s sent out on Thursday and arrived on Monday.

What does that mean for the auction?

Retro Rescuers have the items and the auction will go live on the 23rd of April, 7pm which is tonight!

^{Hint: the 1 item I think that will be overlooked which I’d personally buy to resell, would be the inflatable gravestone. No Active or Sold Listings on eBay, but I found 1 on Whatnot for $350. Ssh, don’t tell anyone.}

Go and bookmark the show right now (click here) and let’s have a fun night.

I’ll see you on Whatnot!

Mat.

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