I LOVE getting emails from my readers and other adoptive families who take the time to share what’s worked for them.

This morning I got an email from Dave & Amy who are doing an interstate adoption of a baby girl that is due toward the end of June.

A year ago they netted over $2,000 from a garage sale. They’re getting ready to do another one, hoping to surpass that amount, to cover their travel expenses and post-placement fees.

They’ve been sharing with friends and family and receiving donations and created a Facebook event to help spread the word.

But this is something I hadn’t thought of – I’ll just copy part of Dave’s email.

I happended to be looking on Craigslist at some of the rummage sales and thought to myself, I wonder what these people are doing with the left over items from their sale?  I know last year we had a ton of stuff at our sale and even when we were done we still had a bunch left over.  We knew someone else having a sale so we just donated the items to their sale.

So my curiosity sprung me into action!  I created a standard email talking about our adoption situation and that we were having a sale and hoping to raise funds.  I started emailing each Craigslist sale posting link for last weekend asking if people would consider donating what they had left to our sale if they were just going to take it to Goodwill anyway.  I sent so many emails that Craigslist sent me a message saying they received too many emails from my email account!!  I think that was at like 50 emails.  I don’t quit easily, so I opened my old email account that I don’t use anymore, but is still active and started emailing from there to the rest of the sales.  I found out that we sure had a lot of sales in our area as I emailed about 95 different postings!! 

I wasn’t sure what the response would be like, but to date I’ve probably heard from about 10 of those people who did donate their stuff to our sale.  Granted some might say, “Well this stuff didn’t sell at their sale, so why would it sell at ous?”  I don’t know that I have a great answer for this or if it will even be effective, but I do plan there to be a lot more people at our sale than any other sale in town the weekend we do it!  We have WAY more stuff than we did last year and stuff of great value too. 

GENIUS! I know when we have a garage sale I’d be thrilled to have someone come get my leftovers.

If you have any other garage sale tips, post them in the comments.

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