Before You Throw Something Out, Check If You Can Sell It on eBay

Today I learned that people will buy and sell just about anything on eBay, including empty toilet paper rolls and egg cartons. If you want to make a few bucks, consider what “garbage” you have around your home that others will pay for.

You might not want to waste space to hoard dozens of toilet paper rolls or egg cartons (both bought by eBayers for crafts projects), but Flipping Income suggests several other items you might have lying around that could be turned into cash. For example, empty boxes for games, toys, or gadgets—people who need a display box or want to return their item to the store might buy them. Old driver CDs and computer software could also be valuable to others:

A lot of people have drawings or files created by software that cannot be opened with modern day software. They must be opened by their original software version. Those makers could have been bankrupt a long time ago or simply upgraded their software 20 times by now and simply isn’t backwards compatible. Whatever the case, various old computer software is worth a ton. The ones on floppies especially more so than CDs.

Someone once told me that his company snatches up all the Palm Pilots they can find on eBay, because the company was using a proprietary piece of software that only ran on those devices and higher-ups refused to upgrade from that software. eBay is a treasure trove for people like that and a potential source of income for you if you have old stuff collecting dust—even broken gadgets.