By Contributing Writer

With the economic situation we are encountering, money is a bit hard to come by at times. Here are two ways you can get free items you can sell on eBay and earn money.

1. Search through your own storage rooms.

This is the most effective way of finding items to sell on eBay and make it a hard cash in literally a matter of minutes if you’re lucky enough.

Go through the things in your attic or garage, or wherever you pile and hide the items you are no longer using. These items could be clothes that you’ve outgrown, lamps, old chinaware, books, magazines or comic books. Honestly, these items could be virtually anything that can still be of use!

I recently raided my attic to look for items that I could action off at eBay. I was delighted to find volumes of DVDs I bought three years ago. These DVDs I found were an assortment of my favorite movies and several complete box sets of my favorite television shows like Friends and Charmed. I remember buying the TV show box sets for at least about 150 USD per series and now that I’m done watching it, I decided to sell it off in an eBay auction. The person who got the highest bid paid a third of the original price!

Aside from the TV series box sets, I also found my Japanese anime box sets. They didn’t have English subtitles as they came directly from Japan so I was not confident that I could sell it off in the auction. Imagine my surprise when people actually bid on them! These box sets were sold just about enough to cover the shipping expense I paid for them to be delivered from Japan but all in all, I think it was a good deal. Better sell them than leave them in the dark to collect dust.

Suffice to say that most of the things I set aside in the attic because I no longer use them, were sold. Try going through the stuff you’ve packed away in storage rooms and you’ll be pleased to know that you can actually profit from them.

2. Chance going to yard and garage sales.

Make it so that you go to these sales during the last day, or the last hour before the owner closes up the sale. You will find that some items were unsold. Browse through this collection of unsold items and once the owner is ready to close the yard sale, talk to the owner and ask if they can give you these items for free. More often than not, they will agree to your idea just to get rid of these items for good. After getting the items for free, if needed, clean the items and proceed to sell it in eBay.

Doing the above will surely give you extra money to save for a rainy day.