Not About The Money

At the start of this year I spend some time reconfiguring the loft in our home. Together with replacing and improving the insulation, I also installed a new loft floor for increased storage space. Once completed we had a bit of a sort out to see which things could go into the loft, and which things we no longer needed.

After rooting through drawers and cupboards, I ended up with a number of things that I no longer needed. Amongst them were things like SD memory cards, a camera tripod, a tablet carry case, a cordless phone, a faulty Microsoft Surface Pro 4, a Raspberry Pi 4 and a few SSD drives.
While I knew that some things still were worth selling, for others I wasn't so sure. For example, I had read that there was a bit of a shortage on Raspberry Pi 4s, so to sell that one makes sense. But for the 1 GB SD memory cards I wasn't so sure, since most devices these days use either microSD or need larger capacity storage.

What I usually do in cases like this is to have a look on eBay. There I can easily search for a specific item and see if they are still selling (in similar conditions to mine).
But that is only part of it, because another useful search filter to use on eBay is the 'Completed Items'. It will show you any matching items which have been up for sale in the past. Not only does it show you if items have been selling, but also for what price. That generally is a good sign on whether it's viable to try and sell something on.

At this point I could've gone ahead and got the average selling price of each item that I wanted to sell. And then use that to list my item to try and maximise the amount of money I could make.

But for me, it isn't about the money.

We live in a time where it's often so cheap to get a brand-new product that the assumption is that any old things can go straight into the bin. But reusing things is way better for the environment.
So for me the challenge became to see if I could get all my old items to people who actually want it. And the best way to do that is by listing them on eBay with a very low starting bid: £1.
That lowers the barrier for people who are looking for the specific item and encourages them to make a bid. And if there are multiple people interested, then of course the bidding might go up a bit.

I took this approach with all my items and in the end I sold every single thing.
And the people interested in them had all kind of different reasons. For example, the Surface Pro 4 sold to someone who uses the spare parts to repair other devices. And the SD card got some interest from a person who wanted to use it with an older digital camera.
Yes, the nearly £200 I made of it is nice to have. But the main thing is that my unused items now hopefully have a useful second life elsewhere.