Debt support thread #2

[Nerfmother]

Here we are! Can't be bothered to think of an exciting title, sorry

That's really impressive, atthestroke. [impressed]

What kinds of books sell well, if you don't mind me asking? I had a run of selling vintage ladybird books, some of which went pretty well. And obviously bestsellers are going to be ten a penny. But with more niche textbooks I wonder whether the postage will be too much or whether they will be out of date and hence not saleable.

I'd be really interested to know a bit more about how to pick books that will sell. I know about doing a completed listings search, but you can't do that while you're in the charity shop deciding whether to buy the book! So how do you narrow it down to know which ones will sell and which ones will be (heavy) white elephants?

Badvoc it's always hard to make big housing decisions. I am well aware that when we buy it will be a 'project' house as we will never be able to afford to buy the kind of house we want to live in long term (our current rental was on the market for £350k 6 months ago ).

themoneyone I have found that our newly instigated weekly family meeting is good for keeping us motivated - at the end the DCs usually get down from the table and DH and I have a quick look at a YNAB print out, how we're doing in terms of food/fuel spends, what that means for the rest of the month/future months etc. it keeps us on track and remotivates us if we've had a crappy spending week. It's taken a few false starts, but I am really beginning to get into that mindset of saving a quid here and a quid there and seeing it mount up (or in our case at the moment, add up to avoiding quite such enormous credit card bills).

I love the idea of family meetings - not sure how much the toddlers can contribute right now, but DD would probably love it (she adores assembly at nursery).
Need to start a new savings pot - laptop is on the blink (I work from home and use it constantly so it's not just to get a new one for mumsnetting :D). Am having a cross day. I guess I could use DH's laptop to save money hides webpages showing beautiful beautiful MacBooks and cries a little bit.

Our youngest adds nothing, but the older DC is really into it, and it's a good opportunity to assign chores for pocket money, keep on top of supplies (ie check the things we run out of more occasionally like toilet roll), get any special menu requests, make sure we don't have too many expensive outings planned for the month and make sure we know what birthdays etc are coming up. I wasn't sure if it would be a waste of time but it's been great for us.

Frog- I tend not to sell text books as they do go out of date quickly and students are savvy to selling them online themselves , so competition is high.

I sell mostly recent non- fiction, you are right heavy books are expensive, so you want to avoid buying them or buy them cheaply enough so that some discard for mistakes don't matter.
I usually buy books at 4 for £1. My average selling price is £8.20, so even if I make a mistake in my stock purchase 50% of the time I still make a large profit.
I usually buy 200 books a week and of that 10% turn out to be of no profit you will get better at having an eye for what sells.

This is the start of the spring jumble sale season- so lots of bargains around.

Ooh, thanks for that! I have now spent a morning trawling the 'sold listings' in the Books section of ebay, and came away a little befuddled. Af far as I could work out the high-priced ones tend to be either first editions, or very specialist techical books, or things which for one reason or another are sought-after or collectable - obscure art books, or militaria or other subjects I know squat-all about. So that wasn't very encouraging.

I will browse around for non-fiction, but have already worked out that cookery books seem to not be a good bet. So what is, biographies, history? Presumably not sleb memoirs or other things that end up in remainder bookshops. Could you be more specific, or would that be giving away trade secrets?

200 books a week is really going it some - do you start at 99p or do you do BIN?

Sorry, so many questions. But I'm managing to make about £300 a month and really need to up that, so all advice is very welcome.

By far the best place to sell used books is Amazon. I do sell some on ebay, but not many. The great thing about Amazon is that there is no listing fees, and a book stays listed until it sells, that's when Amazon take their cut.
Unless you are sure that a book will sell on ebay you may end up losing money.
I would say quality information books sell well, nothing too lightweight.
It is a learning curve, and I learned loads by buying big boxes of books from house clearance auctions, I can pick up 100 books for a fiver- that soon shows you what sells and doesn't.
I don't do antiquarian books at all- I know nothing about them.

themoneyone I feel your pain - my laptop has been dying a death for a year and I just keep struggling on with it
I love the look of shiny MacBooks too!!

So this week I've gone over budget, but surprised myself with beating myself up about it. What's become abundantly clear since I started budgeting for bills weekly rather than monthly (to suit dp wage payment method) is how much we were living beyond our means. Obviously we knew that already from our debt! But budgeting weekly has really highlighted how and where we were making mistakes! So that's a big step forward.

I wish I had the time to sell books online, I'm a book fiend. I have about 1000 ish but I'd probably be too tempted to sell my own, and I really do feel that books make a house a home!

Ah, okay, I thought you were selling all on Ebay.

I did sell books on Amazon for a while, but then got fed up with the way other sellers always immediately undercut you. But I can see that it would work better for less hassle than ebay, and no need to faff around photographing and listing.

I think I better revive my amazon sellers account. Always good to have a plan.

Thanks for the advice, am off to trawl my book sources for new inspiration.

Badvoc spending money on the house : do it up so that you really want to stay when its done - that way if you have to sell it, it will have "soul"

atthestrokeoftwelve
do you have the same name on ebay? Just that the business board on there is one of my other haunts. THe aga food jokes on the books board were always worth it too !

Spanishlady - I'm doing the same with tesco vouchers , and am adding a couple of quid in morrisons vouchers when I go there to try to get christmas manageable.
Twelve - thanks, I might spend tomorrow taking photos and trying eBay again.

I sell my Tesco vouchers on ebay- I get twice the face value, then I can shop around with the cash for bargains.

Why would anyone give you twice the face value for Tesco vouchers? Surely the face value IS their worth, or am I missing something?

You can get 4 times face value for deals, such as restaurants, days out etc. So anyone planning a day out can buy the vouchers at twice face value but still get 50% off their days out.

So a £10 Tesco voucher is worth £40 in deals, and buyers are happy to pay £20 for them. Have a look at sold items on advanced search, loads sell every day, and twice face value is the going rate.

Wow, sounds like magic money! Sadly there is no Tesco near us, and I'm a Lidl shopper anyway.

But I'm busy listing books atm.

Whoop whoop just cancelled sky movies and saved 20 quid and will be in credit next month.
And joined net flix which is six quid and on six devices instead.
Everything else is a basic package - tv, landline and internet.

nerf we spend £38 on line rental, call package and BT vision basic package (adds a fiver and is utterly pointless but committed by DH for a year, I have mentioned my rage on this front more than once). I would trade it happily for Netflix, which is waaaay better. I like how easy it is to cancel Netflix renewal, so we treat ourselves to the odd month of it and don't renew, which I think is v good of Netflix.

Atthestroke, can I ask another question? If you are listing on Amazon to the tune of 200 books a week, do you not have a massive inventory that needs storing somewhere? Or do you have some system for ensuring that you sell books quickly or ditch them?

I've done Amazon for modest quantities of books before, but the logistics of large quantities somewhat daunts me.

Yes dd seems thrilled with Netflix and the little ones are happy about the Pokemon rubbish on there. Cannot believe that we were paying 20 quid for sky movies. Never anything I wanted to see and now we have live film and netflix for half that , covering all devices, no need to replace the broken DVD player

Love netflix, but think will cancel for a bit now we've caught up with Breaking Bad and the amazing House of Cards.

frogs I have a stock of 2000 in my converted attic. I try to sell the books I buy and not increase my stock levels.

the thing with netflix etc (we had lovefilm for a while) is to cost up each film and TV programme and cancel it when you stop using, not a year later

Ah, right! Clearly step 1 in increasing my turnover is going to involve having to tidy my study.

What do you do to make them sell if they're not selling? Do you just lower the price?

frogs- yes lower the price, but not too low to make it unprofitable to post. Amazon charge a set postage- £2.80, so if your book costs more than this to post you must factor that in when setting the price. For books over 1Kg I find MyHermes a fraction of the cost of Royal Mail.
I regularly cull books that have dropped too low/too many on the market, but if you make sure you buy them cheaply this isn't a problem.

Talkin - very true. At the moment it's a brilliant but I can see a point when we watch much less and still pay 5.99 a month. Better than 20 though, so currently it's a saving