5 Ways to Earn from your Junk!

1 Comment | Posted on January 22nd, 2010 in Saving Money.

An extra income is always a desirable thing, but perhaps even more so when it comes off the back of junk you might even have been considering throwing out!! Here are 5 ways to earn a little something extra through your rubbish!

Sell Your Old Mobile

Envirophone.com is just one of many websites that will pay you for your old mobile phone, irrespective of its condition. Many of us have at least one old mobile hanging around the house, stuffed in the back of a drawer! Cash them in! An old Sony Ericsson K800i would fetch £22.09. It’s worth checking out a number of websites doing this to compare the rates you’ll be offered for your phone. Mobilephonexchange.co.uk will pay you slightly higher rates than Envirophone for a number of models and give you a choice of payment in cash, Argos vouchers, Debenhams gift cards or M&S gift cards. Taking the gift cards means you get more value.

Get rid of your old CDs

Many of the tech savvy among us have completely stopped using CDs now and tend to buy our new music in the form of downloads. In my case, this means boxes and boxes of old and unused CDs sitting around clogging the place up. You can sell CDs, DVDs and games through Music Magpie. All you do is type in the barcode numbers of the items you want to get rid of and Music Magpie will instantly tell you how much they would pay you for it. You then decide which of the items you want to part with and they’ll send you freepost envelopes. You send the stuff, they send a cheque. The prices aren’t always great, but in terms of convenience, you can’t beat it.

Get rid of your old anything!

eBay! Need I really say more? It seems that on eBay there is always someone looking for what you want rid of. And what might be a space wasting piece of junk to you could be something pretty useful to someone else. So cash in. Flog your junk! Of course, the prices fluctuate massively with an auction format, but eBay is trustworthy, massively popular and simple enough to use.

Get crafty

Turn your old bits and pieces into quirky little craft items and sell them on. You can even turn your old clothes into costumes! There are a number of websites now geared at people specifically selling their own craft wares, if you prefer to use these as opposed to eBay. The biggest is perhaps Etsy which is a US based website, but welcomes international buyers and sellers.

Antique Dealers

Anything you have that is particularly old might be worth more than you think. What looks like an old worn out table might actually turn out to be fairly valuable and the only way you’ll know is by having it valued. Before you throw anything out or let it go for next to nothing, if it’s something particularly old do some basis research online and, if you think you might be onto something, take it to an expert. You might get more than you bargained for!

As tempting as it is just throw the junk out and be done with it, you can quite easily make a little bit of cash from it with very little effort. And then of course, if you’re anything like me, you’ll use that cash to buy the junk of tomorrow!