trade in your passion
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Trade in Your Passion

Trade in Your Passion

It’s time to trade in your passion. If you have sold your unwanted stuff, you should now have a wad of cash. Okay maybe not enough to buy a Ferrari, but what are you going to do with it? Spend it on more stuff? You could, but that’s not the way to financial independence. What I would advise is that you use it as seed money to start a little part-time business buying and selling for profit: Trade in your passion.

Finding Your Passion

Why trade in your passion? Aside from the obvious – doing what you love, it’s because if you love the subject matter, you will love spending time on it. The more time you spend on it the more expert you become. The more expert you become, the more valuable you become to other people. This means the more valuable you become to other people, the more you will get paid.

Firstly, how can you trade in your passion, when you don’t know what your passion is? It may or may not be obvious. You will need to ask yourself some questions. What do you love to read about? What magazines do you buy. Also think about what do you ‘waste’ time doing. You might think it’s a waste of time but maybe it’s not. This is your life, your passion.

Here are a few examples, although there are millions:

  • Gardening
  • Cooking
  • DIY
  • Playing a sport (there are hundreds)
  • Watching a football team (do you have a season ticket and go to watch your team through thick and thin).
  • Music (what genre?)
  • Fashion
  • Cinema – a specific genre of films or specific actor
  • Gadgets
  • Photography
  • Theatre
  • Stamp collecting etc.

Still stuck? Go to your local Newsagent’s or Superstore’s magazine stands; If you could choose one magazine what would it be? That could be your fledgling passion
Still stuck? Ok here’s £1,000,000 for you. You pay off your mortgage, buy a new car, book a nice holiday. Now what are you going to do. You can do anything – what is it?
There is money to be made in any passion or hobby, especially in this age of the internet. All you need to do is find people who want to buy what you have. Here are some ideas right off the top of my head:

Are you a massive Football supporter? – trade in match programs or memorabilia.
Are you passionate about Cooking? – trade cookery books online, write recipes to sell online.
Do you love gardening? – repair old hand tools, repair lawn mowers, trade in seeds.
Are you a sports fanatic? e.g. golf – trade second hand golfing equipment.
The list is endless, it really is. Don’t edit yourself though. Okay you might not be able to give up the day job to trade vinyl records, but you will be learning to add value and earn profits. AND YOU ARE HAVING FUN.

Where to Find Cheap or Free items to trade

The next step is to find a cheap source of what you want to sell. Here are some ideas:

  • eBay – use the “Follow this Search” function so that eBay sends you an email when what you want is listed. You can set it at the price you want and also by location. Also check eBay for job lots and wholesale listings.
  • Charity Shops – It is strange to think that some people might not quite value the same things that you do. You might pick up what you want for pennies.
  • Car boot sales – A tremendous source of cheap stuff, if you spend the time trawling through it.
  • Public auctions – You might be able to buy job lots of what you want.
  • Fix stuff – Do you know how something works. Can you find a source of spare parts to fix up things and then sell them on e.g. cars, computers, white goods mobile phones etc.
  • Add Value – for example restore old furniture.
  • Knock on doors in your neighbourhood – do they have any broken items, which you can take away and repair?

Amazon to eBay and Back

Here’s a really neat way to trade in your passion, that I discovered by accident whilst trading in my passion – books:

Not everyone who buys on Amazon, buys on eBay and
Not everyone who sells on eBay, sells on Amazon.

What the hell does this mean? Well its called arbitrage and it means that sometimes you can pick up an absolute bargain on eBay and simply re-list it on Amazon for a tidy profit. You are exploiting the differences in the demand and prices on both platforms. Here’s how I do it, I first put all my books up for sale on Amazon. This does take some time, as I research the price for each book. Once the item is sold I buy it back at a lower price on eBay. When it arrives I simply relist it back on Amazon, at the higher price. The net result is I still have the original item plus some nice profits. In a way it’s like my personal library is paying me rent to live in my house!

The logical next step once you start to trade in your passion, is to get your own online presence. This will be the subject of our next chapter. Build a Web Based Business.