OK, I've Made Some Money on Some Sales. Now What?

Well, assuming you've got everything lined up such that you can easily transfer money from your paypal account to your checking or savings account, you can have ready access to your profits in no time at all. Usually it takes 3 - 4 business days for the funds to show up in your bank account once the transfer has been initiated in paypal, but I've seen the funds magically appear in my own personal checking account in as few as two business days.

So, what do you do with this money? The answer???  Anything you wish!!!! It's YOUR money!

Pay off your cell phone bill. Eat out at a nice restaurant. Take the kids or grandkids to an amusement park for the day. Do whatever you want.

My own personal choice was to forgo any immediate splurges on myself. Myself being an ebay seller, I would pour nearly 100% of my profits back in to buying more and more things to list on ebay. 

You see, I started with $25. I bought two or three things at some yard sales, and those items made me $40 or $50 in total profits. I used those profits and went out yard-saling the next week. I don't think yard-saling is even a word, but, what the heck....  it is now!

So, this time around, I bought five or six things. Listed and sold them off. Soon, I had $100 a week in ebay profits rolling in. Now, $100 doesn't sound like a whole lot, and it isn't really. But I know about 50 of my friends and family would could use another $100 a week to pay bills!

But, I still wasn't satisfied with just $100 a week. I had a boring factory job that I wished to replace, and to do that, I needed at least $500 a week in profits. So, week after week, I'd continue my search for new inventory. And new inventory was never hard to find. I could easily spend $100 at five yard sales in a matter of two hours and buy things that could easily bring me $200 in profits. 

Soon, I was listing 50 - 100 new items a week, and selling 20 - 30 items a week. I wanted to continually be adding to and upping my inventory. Constantly two steps ahead of my buyers. Pretty soon I had 1,000 items in inventory, and was selling 50 - 100 items a week under a variety of user IDs. I'd average selling 75 items a week, and discovered I was making an average profit of $12.50 per item. I was profiting over $900 a week, on average, from ebay sales.

And this was in addition to my boring factory job. While my other factory co-workers were all vying for all the overtime they could get, paying $20 an hour for OT, I was doing everything I could to get out of working overtime! I did not want it! I used to love OT, but, I was making more on ebay, with less effort, and could make that money AT HOME! Why on earth would I want OT??

I was asking other employees if they wanted to work my OT. I begged and pleaded with the boss, who didn't give one iota of concern. His concern was factory production, and I was just another factory robot. 

I had had enough, and put in my two-weeks' notice.

So that's my story. 

You are free to do whatever you wish with your ebay profits. I always set some aside to pay taxes with, and set up with a local accountant to keep me legal with the IRS. But, by and large, after I'd made the house payment, paid all the bills and what not, 90% of the what was leftover went to buying more and more items to list. I was hooked!! This was so much easier than my factory job, and with all the benefits: no boss, make as much as I want simply by listing more items, work when I want, take off when I want, etc.)

So that's my recommendation: Treat yourself and the husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend or whomever to a celebratory dinner after your first sale, but from then on, for the next four - six months at least, pour every penny of profits back in to your ebay inventory. It's that large inventory that's going to afford you reliable, consistent sales, and, when that happens, you'll be more able to bank on $100, $250, $500, etc. in sales or profits week after week.