his mission. The guy would advertise on Google, they would take a truck and trailer and haul everything to the dump. At some point early on, they discovered that much of what they were throwing away was really valuable. My son started sorting through the items and keeping valuable items to resell later on eBay.

Now he’s married & in college and has expanded this concept to buying and reselling items online. It really is amazing how simple it is. Every week he finds items at garage sales and online, identifies which are high value, and then posts them to sell. His bread and butter is hats and DVDs, but he also finds big scores nearly every week. For example, he found out about a guy who had a vinyl record collection. He charged nothing for my son to come and take them all away. Then he hired his younger brother to look up the values for each on eBay, which is a very simple process. 20% of them are worth $15 or more, so he is selling them individually. The rest (~800 or so) he is selling in bulk. Today he was offered $500 for the bulk records. In the end he will make over $2,000 for items he received for free.

Things are going so well now that he’s thinking about dropping out of school altogether and doing this full time. It really makes me think that this type of thing could be a good side business for motivated teens, and others who are in school and barely making ends meet. An extra 20 hours per week could easily pay rent and help college students pay tuition.