Last weekend, me, my wife and some friends held our very first garage sale. I mean I’d done loads of these before back in Adelaide with my parents, but it was my first time in Sydney. The event would have been much more successful had it not rained and rained and rained on the day! Only a few die-hard bargain hunters came by, but we still managed to take nearly $400, including some deals negotiated both before and after the event.

If you’re thinking about having a garage sale, here are some pointers:

• Pick a date, and check the long term weather forecast. It won’t be 100% accurate (it said chance of showers on the date that I picked – ha!) Obviously it’s better during the summer months.
• Beware of traders – these are the people who try to get in early, snap up all of your best bargains, and then re-sell at the markets or elsewhere. They’re cut-throat, and will make every attempt to find out what you’ve got and get in there first, with fake stories about how they’re working on the weekend and can’t make it on the day but really desperately need a fridge, or else they show up at your door at some ungodly hour of the morning.
• Advertise! Your signs will get you a bit of traffic, but for maximum effectiveness, put an ad in the local paper, and make sure that it’s the one that gets read by more people of the type that would go to a garage sale. For instance, in Sydney you’d be better off with an ad in The Telegraph (the preferred rag of the working class) rather than the Sydney Morning Herald (too high brow). Make sure to specify the date, and the exact time when the garage sale will start, to prevent the scabs mentioned in the previous point. There are also some free classified Websites such as Gumtree which worked quite well for us.

What are some of the things you’ll need to prepare?

• Sticky labels for price tags
• Plastic bags for people to carry things with
• A “float”, i.e. a bit of extra money in small denominations to start with so that you can give change
• Street signs – remember that you’ll need one for the traffic in each direction, and if you live far away from a main road, extra signs to give directions to help people find you
• A ledger to keep track of monies (especially if you’re sharing)
• A book to read or something else to do during the quiet periods
• Drinks and nibbles

And finally, be prepared to haggle! There will be some hard bargainers, so make the decision in advance whether you’re going to play hard ball and live with the possibility that your stuff won’t sell, or be a pushover and get rid of all your stuff cheaply and quickly but live with the regret that you could have earned more.

As for me, it looks like we’ll be having a re-do next weekend when the weather is more amenable. Look for us on Twitter! I’ll be using the same hashtag as the first one, #naidoomarkets.

The ingenuity of people never ceases to amaze me. It might not seem like much, but I recently saw this in the AdSense block on my other blog:

See what they did there? They used their URL to communicate a message. When you see it, it’s so obvious! I mean, when you own and have full control of your domain, why not create a redirect from the contrived URL to the page that you want visitors to arrive at? It’s brilliant!

When you only have one headline, two brief lines of text and the URL to make an impact, every little bit counts, and this inventive way of “working the system” gets my stamp of approval!

“Single roll” toilet paper dispensers are the work of the devil. At home it’s not so much of a problem because you can always just go and get another roll (or yell for your wife to bring it :P) but I’m talking about commercial or public toilets with those massive rolls.

At the church where I used to volunteer, we always had to throw out “nearly finished” rolls – imagine you found yourself in a public loo running out of toilet paper because some stingy accountant was trying to save money by ordering the cleaners not to change the roll until every last sheet was used. Being a public venue and having dispensers of the type which locked, we couldn’t put a spare roll for people to replace themselves. Not that somebody would try and slip a giant 2Kg toilet roll down their pants to take home; maybe it was more to prevent kids from rolling them down the stairs. Would it have been cheap to hoard the leftovers and take them home?

when designing and building the toilets it may have been cheaper to buy the single-roll dispenser, but this choice ultimately led to more waste, and hence both financial and environmental cost, than if a little extra had been spent on the double-dispenser.

This is but one of the everyday inefficiencies that I want to combat through this blog. Are there examples of inefficiencies in your world? I’m always open to ideas for topics that I can help bring to peoples’ attention, so leave a comment below!

I don’t know what it was like in your family, but mine always harboured a deep seated mistrust for things made in China. Products originating from the land of the Great Wall were always deemed inferior and of low quality due to the country’s supposed lack of quality control. This may be true, but the undeniable fact is that so much stuff is Made in China now, and it’s cheap.

The good news for you and me is that with the Internet and globalisation, it means we have direct access to the Chinese market. A great example is Deal Extreme. This site offers a myriad of electronic gadgets and other trinkets at ridiculously low prices; the little bits and pieces that you never knew you needed. But what’s really amazing is free international shipping, even if your total order is less than a dollar!

I’m not going to take up any more of your valuable time explaining what’s available and how it all works, the site more than speaks for itself. Just go and shop! (Support THRIFTerrific by using my affiliate link).

This is a quick addendum to my previous post about fuel efficiency. I recently read a story about John and Helen Taylor, a couple who hold several Guinness World Records for driving extraordinary distances on the least amount of petrol possible – for example, Melbourne to Rockhampton (2438km) on a single tank!

One particular quote from the article* stood out for me: “If everyone in Australia saved just 10 per cent [on fuel], that would give Australia a saving of $5.2 million a day”!

Now that’s a great example of how to make a big difference in the world simply by making some small changes to a task that you do every day! The Taylors also maintain a Web site called the Fuel Academy, which offers a very clear and comprehensive list of tips to help improve fuel economy. Check it out!

* I’d provide a link to the article (“The mileage masters” – Sydney Morning Herald, May 22, 2009), except that I couldn’t find it anywhere online, the Fairfax Web site or otherwise.