Issue #93

🎵 It’s the most dreadful time of the year 🎵

Week 2 of the Garage Sale Trail. I had such high hopes. Week 1 filled us with joy and lined our pockets. I said to you that the Garage Sale Trail was paved with gold. I was wrong. It’s paved with CO₂ and man tears. If you participated in Week 2, I’m sorry. It’s okay to come at me. We found out the hard way that there is a Garage Sale Trail hangover.

Week 2 is a time where people can’t be bothered to set up their sales or take down their listings. If they did set up, it’s overpriced or the dregs from a week ago. You know it’s a bad weekend when the most money you spend is because you were swindled by a sweet old lady. Yep, that happened to me.

I’ve had enough, let’s get right into it.

P.S. hear more whinging on the Flip Weekly podcast here.

In This Issue

• What I Bought

• What I Sold

• Official Flip Weekly Podcast

• Win a Free $200 Mystery Box

• Flip Weekly on Social Media

• 100% Free Resources to Help You

What I Bought

It’s okay to feel sad. It’s over. Done for another year. 2025’s Garage Sale Trail has come to an end. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. The hopes of scoring Nintendo 64 bundles for pennies on a dollar are dashed, the dream of somehow stumbling upon solid gold bars have vanished. What we’re left with is… is basically crap.

I ventured out with Sam early on Saturday morning to Sydney’s Inner West. The home of narrow streets, terrible beer and pretentious anti-McDonalds hipsters. For real, there’s bigger problems than being able to grab a diarrhea inducing burger after late night drinks on King Street.

We had exactly 30 sales to hit and after last weeks success, I was feeling extremely confident. Confident I was going to be able to double or triple the money in my wallet and confident I could find some bangers for both Sam and I to resell. Unfortunately what we found on Week 2 of the Garage Sale Trail were a combination of abandoned sales and houses setting up basically a single table worth of stuff.

Of the 30 we drove to, I’d estimate around 75% were abandoned. I mean, there were more early morning running clubs than garage sales. The ratio of vegan restaurants and cafes to bargains at garage sales was easily 3:1. For every 1 sale that was open there were 3 greyhound pet owners that couldn’t be bothered to take down their listing when they decided they weren’t going to continue participating in the Trail.

Of those sales that were open, it was 100% not worth searching for a park, attempting to squeeze the car into said park and then look through a bunch of bric-a-brac that you couldn’t even give away.

Here’s what I chalk it up to: these houses in Sydney’s Inner West are small. They’re tiny, they’re thin, they have no back or front yard. It seems the less grass kids touch as they’re growing up the more they eat when they’re adults. With nowhere to store treasures, collectibles and things that I want to buy, they’re left with nothing to sell.

Sam and I develop this theory throughout the day and as 9:30 rolls around we’ve hit all 30 and the only thing we’ve bought are small gifts for family members. A B1 and B2 plush that wasn’t even vintage, and some Barbie dress-up fridge magnets. I offered $1 and the lady countered $3 because “that’s what I learned to do watching American Pickers“.

We make the decision to move away from the Inner West and head back down South, closer to Sam’s place where people have much larger homes and yards. We got lucky here a week ago, maybe history will repeat itself?

Not this time. Of the 10 or so we hit up, I bought from 2. The 1st was a sale hidden behind 2 shut gates that made us question whether or not we’d meet our maker that evening. We were greeted by hundreds of collectibles, video games and pop culture items. 2 dudes, a bit older than me were standing around, not saying a word to each other. Think the ending of The Blair Witch Project if the location was boring middle class suburbia and not an even creepier basement.

The vibes were really off and afterwards Sam said in the car “was that not the most awkward thing ever?“ With all of these items still there at midday, I knew instantly the prices must have been high and they were really were. Although, they must have focused all of their time comping up the video games and figures because I was able to get a cheap book and DVD set.

I saw this big box set of Spider-Man DVD’s with a $5 sticker and my Spidey Senses were tingling. It looked valuable and I assumed, like most people, these guys didn’t put any value on old media. We got our first score of the day.

After that we trusted our gut on a $4 graphic novel that featured a word that I’m always looking out for: Omnibus.

I desperately looked around to try and find another volume to complete the set but this was it. Not to worry, it still sells for an okay amount.

We pay the men and run for our lives. Our next sale I take a gamble on an item that I’m assured is real. A sweet little old lady selling a few of her household items. Glasses, bottles, some of her grandchildren’s toys and her own purses. I spot the logo on this purse: Gianni Versace, a brand that even I’ve heard of. I take a quick glance over. Looks okay.

“It’s genuine“ the seller chimes up.

I’m in that garage sale haze where I’m more focused on securing a deal than looking over items with a fine tooth comb.

She’s asking $20. That should have been my first red flag. I open it up and see a 5 cent coin. Oh there’s money in it and I go to hand it over.

“No no, we can’t sell it without a coin, in our culture it’s good luck“.

Fair enough, I’m charmed by the sweet old lady and the token good luck charm.

Now, if it was genuine like she says it would comp up like this.

The thing is, it didn’t take me long to see that this “genuine Versace purse” is anything but genuine. Here’s what I noticed and something you can remember so you don’t get tricked into buying fake crap.

1. The stitching will be consistent. You can see on the below animated GIF that on the left corner the stitching goes all the way to the edge whereas on the right, it stops and leaves a border.

2. Luxury brands use high quality materials. On authentic pieces that are very similar to this purse, it’s all genuine leather and you can see that marking imprinted on the item. On this one? Just the brand name sloppily added.

3. Markings that don’t add up. On the button clasp we have numerical markings. If we Google those markings the product doesn’t appear. Manufacturers of fake items add these to make the piece look more authentic.

This is my punishment for thinking I scored a luxury brand for $20. Tell a lie… $19.95. A lot of good that lucky 5 cent piece did. So that was it for Day 1 of the 2nd week of Garage Sale Trail. A whole lot of driving for not a lot of stuff. I knew that Week 2 wouldn’t have the same enthusiasm from the sellers as Week 1 but I thought the Saturday might have been okay. I texted a mate of mine if they had any thoughts on coming along to sales on the Sunday and to tell you the truth, I was unsure what response I really wanted to get. My motivation was pretty much at 0 and I was perfectly okay with not going the next day. Fortunately, my mate was the same. I skipped out on Sunday’s sales.

That isn’t to say that this entire segment is going to be devoted to buying just 2 things to resell. That’s boring. Op shops and online sourcing was much better to us, they wouldn’t hurt us like the sales did.

Firstly, let’s talk about the book section. For people that don’t like sport, perhaps the most skipped area of an op shop, right? I’m going to tell you about an author, just a single author, who if you find him in the book section, you can make hundreds of dollars. All you need to do is take a quick glance each time you’re in a thrift store and who knows, it could be your lucky day.

The author is Choi Hong Hi, a South Korean Army General and he was instrumental in the creation of modern Taekwondo. You know, the martial art type stuff? If you ever spot Taekwondo in your travels, look to see if the author is a General and buy it.

There is a huge market for this guys work and I’m a bit bummed out that the books I found were just Volume 2 and 3 of a 15 series encyclopedia. If I found all 15 they would sell for thousands. They will list up for about $100 but the ones you’re ideally wanting are the single, thick books that contain everything there is to know about Taekwondo.

This guy loved Taekwondo so much that he did the worst thing a South Korean Army General can do: he tried to teach it to the North Koreans. The South Korean government was like hold up mate, you can’t do that and he went into exile in Canada to re-evalute his allegiance. Turns out, dude wanted to teach the North Taekwondo so much that he defected there in 1979. He was welcomed with open yet malnourished arms and he continued to spread Taekwondo until his death in 2002.

So just remember next time you’re looking at sporting books, you’re wanting Taekwondo by the North Korean defector who evaded South Korean officials for years.

Speaking of hard to find, I ticked something off my Facebook Marketplace bucket list this week.

I found and secured Nintendo GameCube games! At $10 each it wasn’t a Grand Slam Home Run, especially as the titles aren’t as good as they could be, but it gives me confidence moving forward that one day I’ll be able to obtain a Holy Grail GameCube bundle. Here’s how the titles stack up:

• Super Smash Bros Melee - $65

• Crash Nitro Kart - $35

• Pikmin - $40

• Mario Kart Double Dash - $80

• Luigi’s Mansion - $85

Total value sitting at $305. If it doesn’t sound like much for GameCube, it’s mostly due to the games not having their manuals. Oh well, after all eBay fees and postage we should still net $150 profit and the best part was it was only 5 minutes up the road.

If we jump over to Vinnies for just a moment, this was too weird not to share. With 35 days until Christmas, Vinnies is getting into the spirit. They’ve stocked up on Jigsaw Advent Calendars. For each day leading up to Christmas, you open up a piece of the Advent Calendar and receive 42 pieces of a 1008 piece puzzle. A cool concept for people that like puzzles.

The only issue is that this Advent Calendar is obviously AI generated and the more you look at it, the more disturbing and eerie it gets.

If you’re unable to really see the details in the above photo, let’s take a closer look.

Old man hunchback giving off Uncy Sneakyfingers vibes. We have uncanny valley children, animals straight out of Chernobyl, presents that have melted and the only 2 women of color looking as if they’re working under duress. This is just unsettling.

You’ll notice we’re still in the What I Bought section of the newsletter. I had to buy it. Someone will get it gifted to them. I hope the puzzle is completed and framed. By the way, Vinnies has a lot of these Advent Calendars. You can still get them. You know you want to.

Here’s how my Monday went this week. Woke up, rolled out of bed, decided to check Marketplace. Instantly saw 2 deals that I wanted. Take a look.

Both deals were close to each other and best of all close to me. Dispute spending a hot minute looking up to see if the pink PS2 was worth more than $200 I was able to secure it. The reason I took a bit longer to send the message was because everything in the listing screamed reseller. The seller had taken time to test everything out, the 10 photos that were uploaded included multiple collages and their rating on Marketplace was sitting at 324, almost triple my own. Even when she sent through the meetup location it was a picture of the library with graphics and text over the top - she obviously did this regularly.

Nevertheless, I think she looked up comps for just a PlayStation 2 and didn’t take into account that when you have variations of an item, whether it’s a different colours, different graphics and when you have the original box, it can add a significant amount of money onto your item. Check out the Sold Listings for a boxed pink PS2 below.

We should be able to get at least $550 for this console. It’s quite rare, mainly found in Australia and Europe and wasn’t created for any game tie-in or promotion. Its sole purpose was to try and attract a female audience. That’s right, because what was stopping girls from buying a PS2 was that the original console colour was black. As you can imagine, not many people took Sony up on this limited edition console and so it’s getting rarer and rarer to find.

After picking up the PS2 I swung by this lovely ladies house to collect a bundle of 20 DVD’s of The Wiggles for free. We’re not talking old school original cast, mainly the newer members and the DVD’s with the little carry handles. I wanted to grab these for 2 reasons:

1. It would force me to comp up a large collection of modern Wiggles DVD’s. Maybe it could highlight a specific title that’s worth keeping an eye out for.

2. We can see what a huge bundle of these titles can sell for.

After checking out the physical appearance of the discs, all of them were in great order and I searched them up on eBay. We didn’t have a single DVD worth over $25 but comps show that we could hold out for a sale price of around $150. I’m aiming for a quick sale so they’re up for $100. From now on I’ll stick to the original cast, that’s where the value lies.

A few other cool finds this week:

How many times do I have to repeat… always buy “The Art of“ books. They’re worth big money! If I had both volumes of The Art of A Song of Ice and Fire I could get a lot of money:

Unfortunately there was only the 1. Not to worry.

Shout out to brand new eBay seller Darren Wallace who followed this advice and sold a hard cover Disney “The Art of Animation“ this week for over $100.

What I Sold

Back in October I found a Meta Quest on Facebook Marketplace for $50.

This is old technology, it’s a Virtual Reality headset that was released in 2019. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s basically a giant pair of goggles that you put on your head and what you’re seeing is essentially a screen in front of you. You have a pair of hand controllers and within that screen you can play games, watch movies, experience unique adventures that thrive in a VR environment like float through the International Space Station or travel to different parts of the world and feel like you’re really there.

I wanted to give this a go and with a small family gathering coming up I thought it would be fun to bring along. When I got it home and gave it a go, it honestly was incredibly immersive. Even the default home screen, inside a glass igloo looking up at the Northern Lights was amazing. Then I went up to the ISS and legit had wobbly knees for a minute. It was really fun and looked great.

Despite it being old tech and having 2 new versions available I was surprised to see that not only did it sell for a lot of money, but it also has an incredible sell through rate here in Australia.

After playing around with it for a month, I decided it was time to get rid of it. The novelty had worn off. I couldn’t see myself play games on this thing, I wasn’t going to spend every day in space, nor did I want to watch movies with 500 gram goggles strapped to my head.

I listed it up on November 12th and it sold on the 15th. This old technology still has a few fans and should not be overlooked.

A find from the first week of Garage Sale Trail has sold full price.

Pokemon Ultra Sun, a 3DS game that I found in a sandwich bag is out the door in 5 days. These sort of games are always going to be fast sellers and for a minute I thought I was going to get a return in just 1 day after a Marketplace Buyer got in touch.

The dude wants to meet at the train station, I reluctantly agree. He sets the time and place and even barters down the price. Next minute, he’s out of the chat. Fun!

3 weeks ago, in Issue #90 I told you about a category that goes hard: wall clocks.

$10 into $150 for something that’s only going to bring you misery. For real, when has knowing the time ever brought joy? It’s always “I’m late to this” or “I have to get up“. I’ve always thought about how I never want to know the time. In my perfect world the only indicator of time is the sun. Maybe one day if I ever get rich I’ll make it a point to get rid of time altogether. Wall clocks, no matter how depressing are worth buying if they’re a decent brand.

I’m guessing this 3DS bundle is going to be some kids Christmas present. The bundle had a lot of views on eBay but not a single watcher. I was starting to think that it was a bad decision to bundle the handheld up with a bunch of crap games. Then, as is the case with eBay, the perfect buyer found it and paid full price. If you want to read how I ripped off a kid for this bundle, check out Issue #91.

Sold in 1 day for $65 leaving us with $43.13 in profit, basically breaking even already.

The reason this doll sold for $100 isn’t because people like the movie Wicked, or even the character. It’s because the manufacturers of the toy included a website address on the back that led to a pornography website. I’m not going to include the URL here, but you can guess what it is. The error was all over the news and collectors were hunting these dolls down in toy stores before they got pulled from shelves.

When I told you about this error in Issue #50, eBay sellers had yet to take advantage. In Australia we had a sell through rate of over 250% with dolls selling for over $250. I’m guessing people started to catch on because my $20 thrift store find sat, and sat, and sat.

It was only last week when I was doing a scheduled price reduction on items that have sat in my store for a while that I saw this was still Active. I decided to check out recent Sold Listings and what do you know, the price had dropped to around the $100 mark. It makes sense, these dolls were mass produced, they’re not exactly in limited supply. I dropped my price to $100 and a few days later it sold.

Always be buying Asterix. DVD’s, books, merchandise, it all sells to a dedicated fan base. This $6.99 DVD containing 8 Asterix movies is off to the UK after the buyer spent a total of $143.03 on the DVD, shipping and taxes. Just this week I found more Asterix, this time a collection of pocket books for $2 each.

These type of books are in short supply with some eBay sellers listing individual copies up for $20 each. I decided to list all 8 together as a bundle for $100 on eBay, $50 on Marketplace.

This item I didn’t even know I was buying.

Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga + Bowser’s Minions was inside of one of the 3DS handhelds that I stole off the kid 2 weeks back. It’s one of the funnest things to do when you buy gaming consoles, turning them on and seeing if there’s a bonus disc inside. I was shocked when I looked this one up. Without the case it’s $60, and if I had the case… $120.

Speaking of this bundle deal…

I got the PSP Go to work. I was told it wasn’t working. Turns out it just needed a charge. I bought the USB charger on eBay, waited a few days for it to arrive and then gave it a solid few hours to power back up. All of the buttons worked, the software seemed fine, literally no issues with it. I listed it up on eBay for $250 and Marketplace for $200 and a dude rocked up next day with $200 cash. That was really easy, like taking video games from a baby.

That’s all I’ve got for you this week, thanks again for reading. If you’re after more content, check out the podcast here. See you next week.

Mat.

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