I'm finding the record I'm keeping of all my charity shop and second-hand buys - and any subsequent sales - a very useful tool. It'll be even more useful when I eventually transfer it from a Word document into an Excel table as then I can just add the columns up by pressing a button and won't have to resort to getting the calculator out everytime I need to add things up!! (Having thought we didn't have Excel on our computer, it turns out that we do - so transferring the data over will be a small job for me at some point. And one I'd better get round to doing before the boot sale season starts, and I'm buying lots more things, or it will become quite a big task.)
Anyhoo, I spent £40.04 during January buying items in various charity shops - some of which were for me and some of which were for re-sale. From the re-sale items I made £130.01, so the profit was just short of £90. I have to say the vast majority of the profit came from these Laura Ashley curtains (a whopping £55, I was delighted,) but I've also had some other reasonable sales too, and there are still a few items listed on ebay that were included in the £40.04 spend which haven't finished as yet, so the profit should increase a bit more.
In my quest to 'speculate in order to accumulate' I took a bit of a punt and spent £3.00 on this new Crabtree & Evelyn boxed set in the charity shop yesterday. I knew Crabtree & Evelyn items sold fairly well on ebay but I was really pleased when I found that the Freesia Eau de Toilette alone sold for £21 recently, and this boxed set also has the Freesia body lotion in it.
At the moment we only have two charity shops in Wickford (although there is a HUGE Sue Ryder shop due to open shortly - trouble is, they're notoriously expensive so I'll reserve judgement on how useful it'll turn out to be) so in order to keep 'uping the ante' to find re-sale items, I'm going to take myself over to Billericay tomorrow morning. They have seven charity shops in the High Street and I usually find one or two good items whilst I'm there. Plus they have a Waitrose so I'll be able to buy some smoked tofu, korma curry paste and some decent Quorn items - which turns out to be things I'm unable to buy at all in Wickford and I need them for some low-fat recipes I want to try.
Wow, Well done on your profit.
We have a Sue Ryder near me and I've sometimes found some things very underpriced ie a LA hall runner for £1 which sells new for over £200. They had a good sale recently 3 items for £5 and I bought three tops that were like brand new and each retails at over £20 each. So keep your eye out and keep checking the stock.
Posted by: sharie | 02/08/2011 at 03:50 PM
Really interesting to see how you do with buying / selling and profit.. well done, you have done really great!
Posted by: littlepiecesofwood | 02/09/2011 at 07:20 AM
Well done, Elizabeth - that's a very satisfactory profit.
Posted by: Caroline | 02/09/2011 at 12:36 PM
If you have your purchases in a table and want to add up a column,click in the bottom cell where you want the total to be and then go to the far end of the toolbar and hit Layout. The third option is fx Formula. Hit that and a box will come up with the following text =SUM(ABOVE) Click OK and the program will add for you. Hope this helps!
Posted by: Sheryl | 02/17/2011 at 01:59 AM