Issue #64

Hey, guess what? Mat’s back! After being away experiencing what can only be described as the best 3 weeks of my life, I’m back with some fresh new thrift finds and sales. I didn’t get a chance to hit up as many as I would have liked but honestly, if you take a look at the items below you’re going to see that I hit the jackpot. I legit couldn’t miss, I was walking into the thrift with a hot hand and leaving with some insane items that could easily headline their own Issue of Flip Weekly. Take a read below, then jump over and listen to the podcast and get ready to have your mind blown.

Thanks for sticking with me, you’re obviously a loyal Flip Weekly newsletter reader and someone who wants to make money flipping and that’s what I aim to do each and every week: inspire you with sales and finds, entertain with some loose language on the podcast and generally have a good time with you. Anyway, let’s get started.

In This Issue

• What I Bought

• What I Sold

• Win a Free $200 Mystery Box

• Podcast

• Social Media

• 100% Free Resources to Help You

What I Bought

We’re starting off with an unusual one for me: scrap booking accessories.

You’re looking at a complete set of 40 paper edgers and punches high up on a shelf in the arts and crafts section of a Lifeline thrift store. A few things that caught my eye was that they looked high quality, it was a complete set and we have a decent amount of tools in the case. I could see the $20 pricetag hanging from the carry handle so I investigated a little bit to see if I could find out whether these were a name brand or a generic white label.

Struggling to shut this thing, I could just see a brand name on the back of the case which was Fiskars. Seeing a brand name is always going to be a positive for me and it was worth a look up. I mean common sense dictates that 22 pairs of scissors and 18 punches are surely worth more than $20, right?

This was promising and I decided to pick it up. After getting home I could see that Fiskars show up a lot on a subreddit called Buy It For Life. This is essentially an online forum where users talk about brands and items that you only have to buy once in your life as they are extremely well made. I love that, it means that all 40 pieces in this set should be working without a problem and I can go ahead and list it up with a premium for my Australia Tax. I’m thinking $199.95 on eBay and around $100-$150 on Marketplace.

If I spend $100 at a thrift store I know it’s a good day. Here we have a Nintendo Wii U and here’s what made me want to buy this and what we know about buying video game consoles from thrift stores:

1. They don’t value the box, collectors do.

2. Different or themed is better than plain.

In this situation, we have a Wii U complete in box and it’s not just a regular Wii U, it’s a Mario Kart 8 Premium Pack Wii U. That means that the popular game Mario Kart is pre-installed onto the console making this really attractive for new buyers. I asked if I could open it up in-store and was given permission.

Side-note: the way Nintendo packs the Wii and Wii U is so goddamn annoying.

Inside the box was every single cord, accessory, console and gamepad PLUS it had an additional 4 games inside!

You can buy a regular Wii U console on eBay for as low as $119.95 with free post, most likely where the thrift store got their pricing from. However, with the bonus games, the Mario Kart 8 special edition box, we will get a lot more than $119.95.

After looking at the comps and the active listings I’ve decided to list it up for $299.99 on eBay and I’m very confident I’ll be able to get it. Always remember what I’ve taught you about video game consoles not all being equal.

You know I love old media players so you can imagine I was shocked to see this 2007 SanDisk Sansa Shaker MP3 player for just $12 on a shelf at a Vinnies. SanDisk is in the data storage business so it (sort of) made sense for them to try and create an MP3 player, which were blowing up at the time. This Sansa Shaker could take SanDisk SD cards and had a few unique features at the time to help it stand out. First off you could obviously load up music via the build in SD card reader, but you could also listen to music out loud with the built-in speaker or plug in 2 separate earphones to listen at the same time as a friend. Oh, and kids loved it because to change songs you just shake the crap out of it.

I think the nostalgia bug hit a lot of people as the sell through rate for these is 900% with most selling upwards of $100 each.

I’ll list mine up for $119.95 + post and see how we do. Regardless, it looks great sitting next to my other media players for now.

A few other things I bought:

If you see a graphic novel that has the word “Compendium“ or “Omnibus“ on it for $5 like this, it’s most likely going to be worth picking up. With the popularity of The Walking Dead, I don’t think this will last too long with a price point of $64.95 on eBay and $40 on Marketplace.

For just $8, we have a fully boxed Sanyo microcassette recorder. I’ve found in the past that these little cassette recorders do really well, but only if they’re working. It doesn’t take much to test these out, they just require a couple of batteries and a spare microcassette. Just like with the Wii U, we can ask for a premium as this is fully boxed with all of the inserts including the earphones and manuals.

This is actually really cool, it’s a legit pair of working night vision goggles by Jakks Pacific, an incredibly popular toy company that is probably most well known for manufacturing WWE action figures. I’m not entirely sure if kids are playing with toys like this anymore or if everything is on a screen, but this was too cool to not buy. I mean, which kid wouldn’t want a pair of functioning night vision goggles? I bought these for $20 and I’m asking for $99.95 on eBay.

Now that brings me to the pièce de résistance, the focus of this Issue. Let me preface the image by saying there was a total of 21 books in the bundle and each was marked $3.

Before we go further, if you haven’t seen our past success with Sonic The Hedgehog, go back to Issue #41 and also Issue #8. Absolutely anything Sonic I’m looking over, especially in a thrift store where their items tend to skew towards being old. What we have above are books called Sonic The Hedgehog Archives. Each book contains around 3-4 comics from the original series. We got extremely lucky and found books #0 through to #20, so 21 in total. The series did go up to #24 so not a complete set but that really doesn’t matter.

From buying and selling over the past 14 months, I’ve been able to see first hand just how passionate Sonic collectors are and they’re not afraid to spend money on items that you can’t find in-store or online anymore. Fortunately for me, these archives are hard to find as they’re no longer in print. Out of print books with a passionate fan base? Let’s see what kind of money we can get.

Having paid $60 for the collection, I’m guaranteed to make money, a lot of money. I could list up for $1,995.00 undercutting the other set by close to $1,000 and wait out a buyer or I could list for $1,000 right now and see if it gets snapped up quickly. I’m not exactly in a rush so I think I’ll opt for the $1,995 price point. Isn’t it crazy that this is 2 weeks in a row where I’ve found a book series that should sell for at least $1,000? Could we do 3 weeks in a row? Surely not.

What I Sold

First up we have a huge DVD win where we’ve turned $9 into $149.95 in just over a month.

In Issue #59 I found Volume 1, 2 & 3 of an animated TV show called The Amazing World of Gumball. This TV show has a high sell through rate and it’s entirely possible to get close to $50 per season so if you find them for just $3 each like I did, you’re going to make money.

From DVD’s we move onto a couple of signed books that were bought for a combined $10 and sold for a total of $130. Finding autographed books is something I love to do and it’s such an easy way to turn an ordinary $5 book like Paris The Memoir into $80.

Don’t worry, I don’t pick up every autographed book I find, I’m very much now one and done, leaving them behind for people like you. Be sure to reach out if you find a cool signature.

This didn’t take long to sell! For just $12 we’ve turned that into $119.95 and the buyer paid an additional $64.25 in post and VAT giving this order a total value of $184.20. Crazy numbers for an old MP3 player, right?

In Issue #56 I found this really cool 90’s Gameboy knockoff in the thrift. It was only $5 and has sold for $59.95 + post to the United States to a retro gaming enthusiast. You can watch me find it here on Instagram.

I wanted to include this sale so I can point out that The Phantom items have always done really well for me. Whether it’s glasses or books, they’ve been out the door quite quickly and this copy of the book from 1996 cost me just $0.50 and its gone on to sell for $34.95. The book itself was in pretty poor condition which goes to show that it’s still a decently strong IP to look out for.

This may be the first ever time I successfully sold a women’s purse. We have a black leather Mimco bag that I found at a garage sale during last years Garage Sale Trail. I was familiar with the Mimco brand and whilst this didn’t fly off the shelves it did earn me a semi-decent profit.

I picked this Belkin branded energy use monitor from Savers purely as it was brand new and I knew that Belkin was a good brand. It’s sold for $59.95 and these sort of home appliances that are brand new are worth looking up out in the thrift.

That’s all I’ve got for you this week, I’m sorry I couldn’t flesh out the newsletter to its regular length, I’m writing this the night before publication and I’ve yet to record and edit the podcast. It’s been a crazy busy month and I was out of my routine but we’re back to it now so Flip Weekly will return to normal. Thanks again for reading and I’ll see you next week.

Mat.

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