I have sold our home of twenty years and we are moving about 30 minutes up the street to an amazing place. We are trading some square footage for resort-like living with a million dollar view. I've lived in this house since I was 7 months pregnant with my youngest son who is now headed to college.  Besides lots of great memories, this place was filled with stuff. An embarrassing amount of stuff. 20 years of four people and their stuff. Most of it had to go. 

    A regular old garage or yard sale was out of the question because of two factors. The first is that my homeowner's association does not allow them. I probably could have broken the rules if I really wanted to. My HOA is not very on top of things.

    The second reason is that my friends around here that have held garage sales have advised that the local garage sale shoppers are really intense. They will argue with the owner until she just accepts a dime or a quarter for all of her treasures. They are so persistent and annoying that the owner just wants to get the shoppers out of her face. I am not making this up.  I do live in Miami. People are kind of tough and crazy here from all of the beautiful weather.

    I'd rather donate or giveaway my stuff than argue with the locals, so I did what any sane person would do, I held a garage sale on eBay!

    I have two eBay stores, one for fashion and one for everything else.  I listed the clothes, shoes, and handbags in one and now about half of my closet has found homes with people who will appreciate it.

    As for the fun stuff, tons of it has sold on eBay over the past few months.  I grouped up some of the small stuff into bundles. Now my wallet is fatter and my new place will be clutter free. 


Here are some of the fun things that sold in my  eBay Store :

    I started out with service for 12 in water, wine and champagne glasses in 1994. By 2018. I had about 20 pieces total. Not sure if they were broken during great parties or by a clumsy housekeeper.   They sold singly for a 100 and then the rest were sold to a buyer in Oregon for $850.  They cost $35 each when I registered for them in 1994 so they actually went up in value...

     I bundled some of my "J" collection and they sold at auction very quickly...

    This would have sold for $1 or less had I hosted a garage sale....

   This was an airplane freebee...

This was a souvenir...

 I bought this painting only because the artist chanted "Saint Ann, SaintAnn find me a man"when I looked at it. It made me laugh at the time but the painting sat in a closet for years...

 Old technology always sells. I'm sure that they would have sold for more separately but I did not want to take the time...

 This was a shocker.  I really don't carry my wine anywhere so I'm glad it has found a new home...

Visit my eBay store at http://stores.ebay.com/casachic to see more of my virtual garage sale and follow my eBay journey on Instagram at http://stores.ebay.com/casachic . I give lots of tips there about selling on eBay.

Is there a term for this?

         I was once a working mother. A super busy trial lawyer one. I sometimes left the house before my baby woke up and got home after he went to sleep, so I was also a very-guilty-feeling-working mother.

   After I found out that my live-in-nanny was pretty much a crazy person, I instantly quit my career and I was then a stay-at- home mother. I was all in. In one fell swoop, I went from carrying a briefcase to pushing a double stroller around every single mall in South Florida during the especially hot and rainy summer of 2000 to keep the three of us from going crazy.

t-shirt available at Zazzle.com

   I then became a hybrid of the two. I work out of my house.

    I deal with all of the stay-at-home mother stuff like doing a million loads of laundry (per week!), cooking, carpooling, homework,  being on the PTA, class projects, extra-curricular activities, attending teacher conferences and school events,  finding SAT tutors, and on and on and on and on.

    I also have two paying jobs and write this blog (for free) and do all three from my home office which happens to be located in my bedroom.   I've had a successful eBay consignment business for over ten years and a couple of years ago I started do some freelance trial consulting for a few attorneys that I know.  

    It would probably be easier to just hire a live in housekeeper and go back to work full time. I'm sure that getting a job outside the home would be more lucrative than to do all three of these other jobs at home.  

    I really do like being a stay-at-home mother though. I like the flexibility of being able to be present for the fun stuff that happens during the work day like events at school but more importantly, I need to be around when things are not going well like when someone needs to go to the doctor or needs mommy to make grilled cheese for lunch when a bad cold hits. With my kids now teenagers, I  think being around to make sure everyone is keeping in check is also not a bad idea. 

   However, when you work out of your house, no one else thinks that you are really that busy.  Everyone from my friends, to the other PTA  moms, to my very own large extended family, seems to forget  that I am working during the day. While you would never call a business executive during the day to ask him to drop what he was doing to help you out at the book fair because three mom's canceled, it seems to happen to me on a regular basis. 

    Can we coin a new term for me that will tell everyone that I actually work during the day, especially during school hours? I will print it up on business cards under my name.  "Work-at-home mother" sounds too much like "stay-at-home mother". "Domestic Engineer" is a fancy name for a housewife.  Please help as I am stumped.

Make a little extra cash...

I used to try to write these types of posts on a regular basis, but I've been so busy selling on eBay that I have not had time to blog very much. I started to compose posts on how to start selling on eBay but they are not complete yet. Check back soon.

In the meantime, these are items that I recently sold in my two ebay "stores".   These are things that you may have piled up around the house and are considering donating.  STOP! You may have cash in those closets.  Many of my consignment clients think that I can only sell high end designer goods for them, but this is not necessarily true. Sure, a Chanel handbag will bring in the big bucks, but common items, when in demand, can bring in some mad money.

For example, I sold two pairs of my own old 
FitFlop Sandals this month for over $50 each. They were in good condition, but they were not new.

That's 100 bucks to buy new shoes! 

This cool vintage Ralph Lauren belt was in the "donate" pile of one of my clients. It sold for $80

                           

Another client is moving and digging in to the depths of their clutter and pulled this gem out. This looked like a high school graduation present from the 70's. It was never used. It quickly sold for $67! 

A friend's kid loves Lego sets. He builds them once and then leaves them around the house for adults to step on. I now sell them for him. Even incomplete sets like this one bring in decent money… It sold for $100 and his feet are much happier.

My point here is that sometimes even unglamorous items sell for decent money. 

I've been an eBay Top-Rated Seller since 2000. I sell on consignment. If you live in South Florida and are interested in consigning items with me, e-mail me at LuckyEyeBeads@gmail.com

My eBay "stores" are SouthBeachChic and CasaChic

An eBay Post....

I've been a powerseller on eBay for over 10 years. Even when my babies were small and when I had my three retail businesses, I always kept a little eBay going on.   Right now, I am in full force I have over 500 listings a month and two seller ids.   People always ask me questions about my eBaying so here are a few of the most asked questions and answers...




Isn't it a lot of work to sell on eBay?

Well, yes and no. Many of my consignment clients try it themselves (who can blame them as they get to keep all of the money and not split it with me) but it is sort of like painting your own house or fixing your own car. If it is small job, it is probably worth saving a few bucks but big jobs should often be left to professionals.

Between my two eBay ids, I have over 7000 positive feedbacks. I have regular customers. I don't have the selling limits that eBayers with low feedback have. Due to my long-standing good record, not only do I have listing and selling down to a science, I consistently get the highest prices for my items. (I check this quite often)

If you have a thing or two to sell, it is very easy to snap a photo and list. If it sells, then you need to ship it out right away!  If you have a carload (as many of my clients have) , it is best left to the professional (me)


Why do you have two selling ids?

I started the second id to sell my own stuff when I started the consignment business but now, I just have two because one has an eBay "store" and the other does not. Ebay often rewards its store owners by NOT inviting them to amazing free listing sales. This seems counter-intuitive but in the eBay world, fair  does not always exist. For example, I pay over $50 a month for my eBay store (in addition to listing and sales fees). The the other non-store id gets 50 free listings a month but they often run a sale allowing free listings. This month there was one and I went crazy with free listings and sold A LOT.

What program to you use to list and keep track?

I use GarageSale for Mac. It took some getting used to but was a one time fee and hosts all of my listings and photos and it is really easy to relist from there. I use ebay's own application called Outright to keep track of expenses for tax purposes.

Taxes? 
Yes, if you sell over a certain amount in a year, you get a nice tax form to file with the IRS. Keep this in mind if you decide to run an online garage sale or something.

Do you have any other questions, I'd love to make eBay a recurring theme on my blog!

Here are my sites.

The store one: SouthBeachChic
The non-store one: CasaChic

Sunday Information...

First of all, news from camp is all good right now. Everyone is having fun and looking healthy. Not a lot of letters recently which in camp-speak means "I'm having too much fun to slow down to write a letter".

Some un-named camper found a wi-fi signal in the camp's drama room and was able to text me from his iTouch. This was exciting for a few minutes but then led to texts like "send more socks", "can you order me these sunglasses from Amazon.com? Here is the link. Everyone has them but me" and "Can I use your itunes account to download some songs to my iTouch? "

That is when I texted that I had to go because the complaint department/bank is closed for the next few weeks. (And yes, I ordered socks and glasses from Amazon to be delivered to him this week).  I am certain that if the camp does not change the wifi password soon, that some other mother is going to narc on her kid for texting and they will confiscate all wifi enabled devices as they did with the cell phones the first day.

The other un-named camper's itouch is probably out of batteries or misplaced.  I sent him a gift from amazon too out of guilt.



I've been doing my usual summer de-cluttering while the kids are gone. My house is now in the stage where it looks worse than when I started. There are piles everywhere and you absolutely cannot tell that I have done any work.  I did list some knick-knacks that I like but really have no place for and one instantly sold. It is a trinket box and sold for a great price 
Click here for the details

I have other clutter  lovely items up for auction including nine anthropologie knobs that I have no furniture to go on :(  

Here are the links to my two ebay pages if you know anyone who is interested

SouthBeachChic

and  

Casachic