Summer Tax Savings - Why Having a Yard Sale May Be a Bad Idea

Are you planning to have a yard sale this year? If so, this article is for you. Read on to find out whether holding a yard sale is the best way to spend your time. Perhaps there is a better way to get rid of your old belongings while saving time and money.

Let me ask you a question: Assuming you've done a yard sale before, how much time did spend on it? Be sure to include anything and everything you did to organize it, hold it, and clean up after it. If you do a typical all-day Friday and all-day Saturday yard sale, you probably spent 10 or 15 hours just sitting outside waiting for people to show up, talking to people, showing them all your great stuff, and negotiating prices.

Then there's the time it takes to organize all your items: getting them out of the attic or other storage area, setting up the tables, pricing everything, etc. That probably takes a few hours, right?

So when you add it all up, how much time did you spend on your last yard sale? It was probably at least 20 hours, possible closer to 25 or 30 hours. That's a lot of time. And you are likely a busy person with a job, a family, a house -- you've got a life!

And now let me ask you a second question: You spent 20 to 30 hours, and how much money did you make? Probably a few hundred dollars, right? If you spent 30 hours to make $300, you earned about $10/hour. Not a terribly bad wage. At least that's more than minimum wage.

But was it really worth all that time for that amount of money? Think about it.

And now let me ask you a third question: How much stuff did you still have left after the yard sale was over? If you started with five tables worth of items, you probably have three or four tables of stuff that were hoping to get rid of but didn't. So what do you do now? Are you going to pack it all back up and try again next year?

So here's my suggestion: Rather than doing a yard sale, why not do a good deed instead? You can gather up all the stuff you want to get rid of, take it to your local Goodwill Industries or Salvation Army thrift store and contribute to a worthy cause. You'll save yourself hours of time, you'll get a tax deduction that could save you hundreds of dollars, and you'll have absolutely nothing left over to put back in the attic when you return.