Rob & Melissa Stephenson from Flea Market Flipper talk about what to do if you have no money and need to make money today!
How We Turned $100 Into $500 Without Using eBay
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fleamrktflipper/
Check out our FREE Workshop: https://courses.fleamarketflipper.com/flipper-university-workshop-webinar
You can find us at: https://fleamarketflipper.com/
What I Would Do If I Had No Money And Needed To Make Money Today!
Rob: What's up, pro flippers? On today's episode, we are taking the question, what would I do if I had no money in my bank account right now and I needed to make money immediately?
Rob: Alright guys, so on today's episode we are handling this question of what I would do if I had no money and I needed some cash fast quickly.
Melissa: And that's one thing that is pretty awesome about this business is you can make money quick, which is really cool. You don't have to like have a whole business infrastructure built out before you can start seeing income come in. So that's the really cool thing is you can make money fast. It's so we, we are kind of like, okay.
What would we do if we really needed to make money right now 'cause I know there's probably some people in that situation right now, so we wanted to give you some actionable steps that you can take to go out and make some money right now.
Rob: And the cool thing is I'm an average Joe. Guys, I, you probably know from hearing me speak.
I am not super educated. I don't, I'm not a rocket science, scientist. You guys know, it's just an average person can do any of this stuff and really get results and start their foundation of their business, start making money in their business. So, that's what we're gonna handle today, is really giving you some basic stuff that you can totally jump into right now and make cash fast.
Melissa: So the first place to start would be kind of go through your house and take inventory of what you have that you are not using that could make, actually make some money. So, some like brand, brand name things typically sell well. So that can be some quick cash on Facebook Marketplace.
Rob: Yeah, and, and think of anything, stuff that you haven't used or even stuff that you can just get rid of to make some money quick. Totally, go with that. Exercise equipment, gadgets, gidgets, whatever you call them. Gadgets and gidgets inside of the kitchen, breadmakers, dehydrators, all that kind of stuff. Stuff that is in there that you haven't used. It's sitting in the bottom of the cabinet, just stuff that you, you've overlooked and you haven't used it.
You can start with that stuff, get that stuff posted on Marketplace, Facebook Marketplace, and you can make money immediately. You can put it on there and you can sell it very, very quickly.
Melissa: Yeah. We've actually recently had two sales on Marketplace. We have, I think we just talked about it recently, but, a $450 and $450 and $500?
What was the other? Yeah, $500. And you do have to be a little bit careful. We just recently talked about this too, that you do have to watch out when you're listing on Marketplace. There are people come out of the woodwork and they're scammers. So, we'll link to another one where we talk about watching out for Facebook scams, it, it pretty much just like, If they're gonna offer you more money or they're trying to pay you not cash, and they're trying to, you know, show you that you got payment but you didn't really get payment.
Just, just beware. Like if it sounds fishy, it probably is. Yeah. So, yeah.
Rob: And typically for this kind of stuff, cash in hand. Yeah. You're not talking about thousands of dollars of money. No. And most people can run to the ATM and get the cash that we're talking about to make money fast on smaller items, items that you can meet on Facebook Marketplace, meet at a local, strip mall, a bank, a police station, a fire department, something like that. Places that you can meet to be safe and just hand cash over for the item. It's very, very easily. Don't any other stuff outside of that, that seems like it might be a scam.
Stay away from it. Don't mess with it until, yeah, you understand exactly what is going on. But the biggest part is yeah, cash in hand for the item. Tell everybody that you're dealing with anybody who's interested. And there are scams out there, but there are good people out there as well, that you can totally sell stuff and make some money with it.
So, just be, be careful.
Melissa: Yeah. And to go along with also selling a Marketplace. You can also have a yard sale so that go through your house, you know, just for this weekend, go and have a yard sale. You can make it a couple hundred bucks just by, you know, sitting there for the day. And, we, we like to do yard sales and put up good signage so people can find you, and have a yard sale.
If you're not in a community. Sometimes the communities have their, you know, regulations. You can only have them on their certain days. But that can be some quick cash too. Yeah.
Rob: One of my favorite things to make, quick cash. If you need cash right now, you can go out today, drive around and look around.
Hopefully you have a vehicle. You can look at stuff that people are throwing away. Just this morning on our walk to the downtown area to.
Melissa: You have to go back and look at it.
Rob: One of the trash, one of the houses, put out tons of stuff on the side of the road. And, if they're moving out or they just were cleaning out, don't they?
There's a lot bookcases. They had chairs, they had all kinds of stuff. Stuff that you could totally, pick up and bring it back and take one picture of it, throw it on Marketplace and create cash today. So that is one of my favorite things. And you guys might remember on previous episode, we talked about a humidor that we found in the trash.
Picked it up. That one I had to put a a a piece of plexiglass in one of the sides. One of the sides was broken out. It was just a small, narrow piece of glass on the side of it, and I used plexiglass instead of glass, put it in there. And I ordered a new, humid, controller for it. Spent a total of what, what did we spend like $60?
Yeah, 60 some dollars for it, but we got it out of the trash and then we sold it for $450. Now I could have gone not doing anything, brought it home. It was still a very nice, beautiful piece. Yeah, I could have taken a picture and said, hey, it needs a piece of glass over here. It, it has the, the controller in it, but I don't know if it's working right. So you might have to update that. And we probably could have sold it for at least $250. Yeah, $200, $250, somewhere in that range. Just by doing nothing. Picking it up, bringing it home, listing it on Marketplace and selling it. So the options are out there. That's my favorite way, is actually to go out there, look for something that somebody's throwing away.
Bring it home, clean it up, test it. We found you can't, we found tens of thousands of dollars of items out of the trash not even really looking. No, we don't typically look. But we walk a mile from our house to our downtown area. We do a jog on the trail, so we're out and just walking and seeing stuff. And just on our normal routes, we've, we've found tens of thousands of dollars of items that people have thrown away.
Yeah.
Melissa: Furniture, beds, like tables, all kinds of stuff.
Rob: Dyson vacuum, all kind cases, anything you can think of, people have thrown them away. You can bring them home, clean them up, throw them on Marketplace, make an extra $25, make an extra a hundred dollars, make an extra $500, whatever it is that you're, what you're getting.
You know, most of it just needs to be cleaned up a little bit. And you can totally sell it, and make some money. So that's how I would make money super, super quick. Yeah. Once you get to it and you get a little bit of money in, what would I do next? Reinvest it.
You reinvest it.
Melissa: Use the money, but take a portion of it and reinvest it in actually finding stuff that you can, pay for to flip.
Yeah. And when we're saying pay for like. You we're, our goal is to spend $50 on something and then have it sell for $500 at least. So like we're, our goal is to 10x x. So we're not looking to, you know, go spend $500 to make $600. Like, we're not trying to invest a lot of money, so you don't need a lot of money, which is great, and you can still make money, so.
Rob: So my next step is to open an eBay account and start selling instead of Marketplace jumping onto eBay, because eBay is a huge community app that reaches 150, I think they have 152 million registered users to where Marketplace typically is limited to your local area, your local town, your local, just area that it reaches, and you are, are limited to how many people are looking for that item. So you can ask more when you get onto eBay.
So that's what I would do. I would start out with stuff locally that you have going and getting stuff out of the trash if you need it. If you don't have anything in your house that you can sell, you can totally get stuff outta the trash, list it on Marketplace, sell it, make some money fast. And then I would make the transition over to eBay and that's where I would start selling stuff.
Melissa: Yeah, and it's good to note too, like in the beginning we would still open an eBay account, get that going because they're gonna hold your funds in the beginning and you're gonna, they're gonna make sure you're a legit person. You're a legit seller before you get started, so the sooner you get that, ball rolling, then your limits will be, increased and everything will get moving.
So if they limit you, I can't remember exactly what it is right off the top of my head, but, a dollar amount or a number amount, however much when you're first starting. So if you wanna get that lifted, you gotta go ahead and get stuff listed now. So.
Rob: Absolutely start building the, relationship with eBay, building a relationship with your sellers, so you can, you can excel with it and start really making some good money on eBay.
Melissa: Yeah, I wanted to also, another way to get some free items, there another way is, going to some apartment complexes. So especially at the end of the month when people are moving in and out, people throw away in college areas are another one, like when people are leaving the dorms, there is so much furniture that is by the dumpsters that's perfectly good.
It is, but people don't want to bring it or whatever for whatever reason. They can't. Take it with them and they, you can get some good stuff right near the dumpster. So, so that's definitely worth checking out.
Rob: Another business model, rent a U-Haul. Go to some apartment complexes, load them up with stuff that people have thrown away.
Bring them back. Use it as a yard sale. List it while it's at the yard sale on Facebook. Marketplace. Guys, you can make if, if you have, if there's a will, there's a way. If you have the will to succeed, there is money to be made everywhere in this business. Yeah, you can totally come up with ways to make a thousand dollars, you know, in the next seven days.
You totally can do that. Just by looking at free stuff, getting stuff listed, and really start your bankroll to start this business.
Melissa: Yeah.
And there's people listing free stuff all the time on Marketplace as well. So there's a free section, on all the apps, I think on OfferUp, right? Yeah. And Facebook Marketplace is a free section.
You can search for free 'cause people write free. Sometimes people put their thing as free and then in the description they, they put a price, which is super, super annoying. Yeah, I hate that. Just put the price on it. But you can still find free stuff and there's apps like free cycle. There's a whole several different ones that just people are posting.
They don't want it to go to the trash, but they don't like, they just are giving it away. So.
Rob: I still remember the one thing, the best thing, and I've got a lot of stuff for free off of the apps, out of the trash, that kind of stuff. The best thing that I've ever gotten is the ice cream machine. A lady had an ice cream machine in her shop and it was three phase, and she didn't know that when she bought it, she bought it, they was gonna charge them two.
The electrician was gonna charge too much money to put three phase into the shop to run the ice cream machine. She posted it on OfferUp and said the first person who gets here can have it. I saw it after 15 minutes. I messaged her and said, hey, I'm loading up my trailer right now, and she's about 45 minutes away.
I said, I'm loading up my trailer right now. I can be down there. She gave me the address. I went and I picked it up. We sold that free ice cream machine, what is it? $8,500 something? $8,500. $8,500 for something that all I had to do was drive 45 minutes, put it on my trailer, bring it back, and we actually even sold that locally. $8,500 that we made from somebody who just wanted to get rid of it, be done with it.
Nothing was wrong with it. She just didn't have the capacity to get it installed into her ice cream shop, and she gave it to us. So, yeah, there's. I'm telling you, there is stuff out there that you can make so much money. I mean, we just told you about the humidor, that this is just what happened in the last two weeks.
The humidor happened. Ice cream was I think last year we did that one. Yeah, but there's still tons of stuff that you can find for free and be able to do that with. So,
Melissa: and another way too, to find free stuff is you can put out signs or you can put on ads on Marketplace or on OfferUp, wanted ads for us.
Specific thing. You used to do that for hot tubs, right?
Rob: I did. Hot tubs and jet skis. That's another story. So that was a sweet one as well. So I put an ad out in the newspaper. This was before apps. I put an ad in the, our local newspaper, the class, a section for free jet skis that were broken. And somebody called me up with a jet ski on a trailer, covered up outside.
It, had been covered up for years. Gave it to me for free. I said, how much do you want for it? He goes, that thing was awesome for me. I loved it. There's nothing wrong with it. I just sat it back there and then it, it, it just, sat back there and went to waste. So, covered up underneath the tree in the back.
Still beautiful when you pull the cover off. Just needed to be bleached, cleaned, that kind of stuff. Got that thing, we use it. That was one of my favorite jet skis ever. All I did is clean the carburetor on it, put new gas in it, and, yeah, we ended up using it and then we sold it for a couple thousand dollars.
Was that the standup one or no? No, it was a sit down one, but an older, Sea-doo XP model, but came with the trailer and the guy said, listen, I had so much fun with that thing. You don't owe me a thing. I got my money outta that. You can have it for free and do what you want with it. We rode it for a couple years before I actually sold it.
So it was a really, really cool jet ski. But another one of those just throwing an ad in a newspaper and one of the apps, something like that where you can ask people, hey, we'll come and pick something. If you're getting, trying to get rid of something, we'll come and pick it up for free, and you can do that and find really, really good items as well just by putting an ad out there.
Melissa: Yeah, if you have specific kind of items that you're looking for, sometimes not even, if you're just gonna help somebody like clear out stuff, you can go, then you'll have to go through it. And that's the one thing you know when you don't have a lot of money to invest or anything, you might have to go through some of the other things.
Like you can go at the end of a yard sale and people pr pretty much are just throwing things away. If you wanna take stuff away, they'll give it to you pretty much. Absolutely. So if you offer like in an ad to clear, clear out or pick up stuff, maybe electronics or whatever it is, you can still, you can make some money that way and you don't even, you're not going out anything. So.
Rob: Alright guys. So there's so many ways that you can make money with not having anything in your pocket right now. Don't let that stop you. Get out there and really start digging in and make some progress towards making some money towards your business.
Melissa: Yeah. And this is the last week we have applications open. If you wanted to check out the one-on-one coaching. So it is, if you wanna go to fleamarketflipper.com/workwithus, we'll have applications open just for this last week. Yep.
Rob: You guys rock. We will see you on the next episode.