Recent Posts

April 3, 2023- More Sales and Inventory


Since my last update I have bought three more items and sold four items. I have bought two decorative plates which appear to be antiques, after I did research on them. I bought them for a total of $7.56 and others have sold for around $80 each online. I currently have them listed at $145 for both, which could end up turning into my largest flip in changejarflip to this point. I continue to be amazed by the high dollar value of some of the items I am finding in my local Goodwill. I will say Goodwill has been a real eye opener for me on low cost items I did not expect with such high value, at times. It has given me the gambit of items to buy to be able to build up the inventory amount.

Antique Plates bought 3/19/23

The second item I purchased was a marriage advice game and book combo. I paid $8.11 for this item and it looks like I can make 60% on the amount I have put into it. This one is a little below where I would like to be selling inventory items, but I have not been dedicating much time to finding items and thought this was a good one to keep things going with the money I need to reinvest.

The third item I purchased was a set of roller blades. I paid $16.77 with the expectation to be able to double my money on them. This is another good flip, and I found them in less then five minutes in Goodwill. My whole thing right now is to be able to find items in a short amount of time to keep the overall amount of effort involved in this low and show just how much can be earned with minimal effort.

When I view this from an hourly rate on what I have been buying lately, and the expected returns I am getting well over $20 an hour which will should continue to grow my initial investment well for a long time. I break the hourly in the following way. It takes me at most 10 minutes to find an item, and I am looking to make at least $10 on them in average now. It will then take me less than five minutes to get it online and less than five minutes to package it up and drop it off. All said and done I should be 20 minutes or less on each item I end up flipping. At $10 profit an item I should easily make $20 an hour or more.

Sales for this period

I sold the Iowa puzzle, Butter tray, DVD, and the 2 Hot Wheels all this past week between 3/31 to 4/2/23.

The Butter tray I bought for $10.27 and ended up making $13.24 of profit from it. This was another very quick buy and flip situation with me having bought it on March 8th and selling it on March 31st. This type of flip is what I am trying to focus on moving forward for a while.

The Iowa puzzle was a very small loser for me. I paid $1.18 for it and lost $.05 when all the shipping and fees were done. I am ok with this loss at this point, because the puzzles helped me get this experiment going they are no longer the driver I need to continue to grow my overall inventory value. As well, a $.05 loss on the $1.18 makes me know I have my shipping costs estimated fairly well moving forward. I have reduced the price down on many of my initial items to try and get them to move so I don’t have to deal with making smaller amounts of profit as much, and can move into the higher priced items.

The DVD was another expected fast flip for me, or I would have not bought it, and it did not disappoint in the speed. I bought it on March 1st for $2.15 and sold it on March 31st and made $2.09 profit. An almost doubling of my amount I put into it is always the result I am looking for on the lower amount flips at the minimum.

The 2 Hot Wheels were bought on August 3rd of last year for $2.10 and sold on April 2nd making me $1.70 of profit. At the time I bought these in a grocery store to show you can find items to flip in almost any type of store, and this proves my point in a simple way. I made 81% on my money in eight months. An annual return would work out to over 100% in 12 months.

I know have made over $240 in profit since I started at the end of last June. I will be at a year in the next couple of months and want to have the $136.58 I need to reinvest back into items so I can see how much can be done in one year. I am still very happy with how this has went.

Current Inventory

ItemCostDate PurchasedSoldProfit
Ireland Puzzle$3.456/27/22
NFL Puzzle$2.376/27/22
Animal puzzle #1$1.186/29/22
Animal puzzle #2$1.186/29/22
Iowa Puzzle$1.186/29/223/31/23-$.05
3 Hole Punch$1.186/29/22
Serving Dish and Bowl$9.297/20/22
*Star Wars Puzzle$2.377/25/22
*2 Hot Wheels$2.108/3/224/2/23$1.70
Star Wars Puzzle$1.188/31/22
Animal Puzzle$1.188/31/22
Animal Puzzle$1.188/31/22
*2 Coca Cola Puzzles$6.919/13/22
*Christmas Coffee Cup$1.189/13/22
*Stapler and Stapler remover$.549/26/22
*Floral Plate$2.719/26/22
*Old Spice Cologne bottle$3.259/26/22
*Wood block set- kid’s toy$2.179/26/22
*Japanese Stein 1$3.259/26/22
*Japanese Stein 2$4.339/26/22
*Satellite Puzzle$2.3711/28/22
*Tealight$2.3711/30/22
*Board Game$3.781/4/23
*Painter’s puzzle$3.781/30/23
*Roblox characters$5.941/30/23
*New Hard Drive$5.942/9/23
*Logitech Ergonomic Mouse 1$10.272/9/23
*Antique? vase$8.112/21/23
*DVD$2.153/1/233/31/23$2.09
*Teapot$5.943/3/23
*Butter tray$10.273/8/233/31/23$13.24
*Yamaha Receiver$14.713/13/23
*Antique Plates$7.563/19/23
*Marriage book/game$8.113/24/23
*Rollerblades$16.774/1/23
Underinvested $136.58
Total inventory amount$260.89
*Indicates purchased from Profit

The Intelligent Investor by Graham & Dodd- Book to Read


Reading is one of the most important things you can do to increase your knowledge about the world and how to think about investing in anything available. My favorite book all time about investing is the Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. This book explains how to think about buying stocks to obtain a margin of safety as the core idea. If you read this book, you will understand concepts which have worked for a very long period of time in terms of determining the value of an asset.

Benjamin Graham

Benjamin Graham was the definitive “founder” of value investing over seventy years ago at this point, and there are numerous articles about how he was the teacher of Warren Buffett, who is considered the greatest investor of his time by many, including me. Graham taught a class at Columbia in investing and was able to write the Intelligent Investor along with David L. Dodd. He was a person who had an extreme interest in learning his whole life which allowed him to create a framework for analyzing stocks in a way which was more formulaic and allowed for a real evaluation of the companies he was looking at.

About the Book

This book is twenty chapters which all offer a great thought process about different ideas depending on what type of investor you are mainly defensive or enterprising. The most important chapters in the book cover Margin of Safety in chapter 20, and Chapter 8, Mr. Market and Fluctuations. If you understand these two chapters well, you will be far ahead of most people who are doing investing in stocks on their own. Warren Buffett has talked about these being the two most important chapters to understand from the book.

As well, there is a very interesting appendix in the book which covers a talk by Warren Buffett where he goes into detail about how some of the students of Benjamin Graham went on to be very successful in the world of investing and gives their results for each year, they operated investment funds with annual returns over time.

I have read this book three times over the past couple of decades and return to it again over time to make sure my thinking is still being solid, and I am applying the fundamentals with the margin of safety at the forefront of my mind. I am sure I will read this book more times over the years. It just contains so much good information which still applies even all of these years later. Even more important is the how Graham leads the reader to think about concepts against examples of companies in the book in whatever version you are reading in a way which make you examine a stock in an effective way.

The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham and David Dood
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

Why The Intelligent Investor is Applicable to Flipping

When making a decision to buy anything you expect to sell later for more money you need to think if the price you are paying for the item is a good value compared to what you can sell it for at a later time. This is the core principle I take when doing a flip. I always think of my margin of safety when I make a purchase which is taught in this book in Chapter 20 and can be applied to any type of investment. There is a saying in the book that if you talk to someone about buying an item for $.40 on the dollar, they immediately get it or normally it will be hard for them to accept that concept.

An example of this is when I bought a coffee grinder for $5.94 and ended up making a profit of $45.36 on it. My margin of safety on this item was extremely high when I purchased it. I arrived it this by knowing the brand was a highly desirable one and could see other items selling for an extremely large margin. I knew when it sold the possibility I would lose money was highly unlikely. The thing I didn’t know was when it would sell, which is the same thing you wouldn’t know when you buy an undervalued stock. The other thing I do which is in the same thought process Graham shows in the book is diversifying my buys across multiple items that allows my possibility of overall success in a year or longer at a very high rate.

Never stop learning and keep on reading!

March 18, 2023 – Sales and New Items


I sold the coffee maker I purchased recently for $89.99 on March 12th. After all the shipping and fees I ended up making almost $40 on this flip. With this flip it puts me having made over $200 since I started flipping my change jar coins at the end of June of last year.

I’m pretty amazed I was able to make this amount of profit this quickly. I thought I might be able to make double my initial amount in a year and have turned the amount I had into over $100 in inventory with me buying the items I did initially to get all invested. The first sales I had really helped to grow the amount and the first big profit off of the coffee grinder has made this easier to make more moving forward and some good luck along the way is definitely working together.

I have not been able to get all the profit reinvested back into items at this point. I purchased a metal cupcake tray, a butter tray, and another receiver. Just like the coffee grinder, I got a bid the first day the cupcake tray went live online. I ended up selling it on March 17th for $21.24 and made $5.60 of profit from it. I paid $10.27 for it and made over 50% in just eight days. The speed at which items are selling has been something I haven’t expected. I thought I would be selling around one item a month but I am getting close to one item a week. In the month of March I’ve sold five items already.

Cupcake Tray

I ended up also selling two other items since my last update. I sold the book one, two, three infinity and the snowglobe. I ended up only making $.02 on the book, because I had the amount of fees off as a percentage I was required to pay on a book. My previous experience of flipping books has taught me books are a way you can go, but the market is much tougher for these now than when I was selling them. I won’t likely sell any more books, because the margins are going to be too low and I need to invest too much now.

I sold the snowglobe for $28.00 plus shipping. Once everything was all calculated I ended up making $18.17 of profit on this. The snowglobe ends up being a very good flip with me having bought it for $3.45. I made 5.26 times my initial money in profit in just over four months. Rough math for annual return would be 5.26 times 3 for 15 times the amount invested which would be over $50. This shows again how starting with a small amount can turn into something much bigger.

I need to reinvest $136.22 to have all the profit I’ve made in inventory to flip. This would put me at $260.89 of inventory. My current profit is at $224.51 and I am going to try to see if I can do some very quick flips through craigslist to push the total amount to $500 as fast as possible. I don’t know how this will go, but I’m interested to see what will happen. The first receiver I sold on craigslist showed me there is a lot of possibilites in quick flips on it.

Current Inventory

ItemCostDate PurchasedSoldProfit
Ireland Puzzle$3.456/27/22
NFL Puzzle$2.376/27/22
Animal puzzle #1$1.186/29/22
Animal puzzle #2$1.186/29/22
Iowa Puzzle$1.186/29/22
3 Hole Punch$1.186/29/22
Serving Dish and Bowl$9.297/20/22
*Star Wars Puzzle$2.377/25/22
*2 Hot Wheels$2.108/3/22
Star Wars Puzzle$1.188/31/22
Animal Puzzle$1.188/31/22
Animal Puzzle$1.188/31/22
*2 Coca Cola Puzzles$6.919/13/22
*Christmas Coffee Cup$1.189/13/22
*Stapler and Stapler remover$.549/26/22
*Floral Plate$2.719/26/22
*Old Spice Cologne bottle$3.259/26/22
*Wood block set- kid’s toy$2.179/26/22
*Japanese Stein 1$3.259/26/22
*Japanese Stein 2$4.339/26/22
*One, two, three infinity$1.0710/19/223/7/23$.02
*Satellite Puzzle$2.3711/28/22
*Snowglobe$3.4511/30/223/17/23$18.17
*Tealight$2.3711/30/22
*Board Game$3.781/4/23
*Painter’s puzzle$3.781/30/23
*Roblox characters$5.941/30/23
*New Hard Drive$5.942/9/23
*Logitech Ergonomic Mouse 1$10.272/9/23
*Antique? vase$8.112/21/23
*DVD$2.153/1/23
*Coffee Maker$7.353/3/233/12/23$39.85
*Teapot$5.943/3/23
*Butter tray$10.273/8/23
*Cupcake tray$10.273/9/233/17/23$5.60
*Yamaha Receiver$14.713/13/23
Underinvested $136.33
Total inventory amount$260.89
*Indicates purchased from Profit

March 3, 2023 – New Inventory and a Quick Sale


I have bought four items since my last post, buy have not fully reinvested the amount I have available. I purchased two higher cost items, a receiver and a coffee maker. I also purchased a DVD, which I did not expect to buy because the resell probability looked high on it in a short time frame. The last item I purchased was a teapot.

The coffee maker looked like another big potential winner for me and was priced at $13.59 but was 50% off on the day I found it. It was $7.36 with tax after the discount. I saw two of the same models which have sold for $100 and $150. I listed it for $89.99 to try and get a quick sell. By the end of the day on which I bought it there was already a bid on it for $89.99. As long as it gets paid for and if there are no more bids I will make over $40 in profit, off of this coffee maker flip. I continue to have good luck in finding items which I’m making big returns on very quickly.

The two items are all set for me to double my money on based on the prices I bought them at. I am starting to look at ways of seeking some of these items through different methods. The DVD costs $2.15 and the teapot costs me $5.94.

Sony Receiver

I am going to try and move the receiver I bought on through Craigslist. I’ve not sold much stuff through it, but it is worth a try to see how it goes. I paid $27.70 for it and would prefer not to have to ship it because of the weight. The good thing about flipping is there are always many different places to sell the things you find.

Sony Receiver

I ended up selling the receiver on 3/6/23 through Craigslist for $40. This was a quick flip in under a week from buying it. I made $12.30 in a week off of this, and made 44% on it in a week. With a turnover rate of 52 times in a year this would be another situation where I could not reinvest the new amount enough to continue this over and over. I might be able to to reinvest around the $27 mark 52 times in a year though and make 40% each time. This could still be a phenomenal annual return anyway. Running the math on this I could do 40% times 52 times $27 to start with would be $576 of profit. Again, the power of small amounts turning into something that could matter to someone.

At this point I’ve made $160.88 of profit since I started my changejarflip on June 29th. I did not think I would be able to get to this much profit this quickly, but that is why I wanted to try this to turn it into something substantial. I need to reinvest $85.81 to be fully invested again. If the coffee maker sells, I will need to invest over $125, and will have 32 items in my inventory. I am going to have to move into higher priced items to keep the profit amount fully invested. I’ll update again when I have another sale.

Current Inventory

ItemCostDate PurchasedSoldProfit
Ireland Puzzle$3.456/27/22
NFL Puzzle$2.376/27/22
Animal puzzle #1$1.186/29/22
Animal puzzle #2$1.186/29/22
Iowa Puzzle$1.186/29/22
3 Hole Punch$1.186/29/22
Serving Dish and Bowl$9.297/20/22
*Star Wars Puzzle$2.377/25/22
*2 Hot Wheels$2.108/3/22
Star Wars Puzzle$1.188/31/22
Animal Puzzle$1.188/31/22
Animal Puzzle$1.188/31/22
*2 Coca Cola Puzzles$6.919/13/22
*Christmas Coffee Cup$1.189/13/22
*Stapler and Stapler remover$.549/26/22
*Floral Plate$2.719/26/22
*Old Spice Cologne bottle$3.259/26/22
*Wood block set- kid’s toy$2.179/26/22
*Japanese Stein 1$3.259/26/22
*Japanese Stein 2$4.339/26/22
*One, two, three infinity$1.0710/19/22
*Satellite Puzzle$2.3711/28/22
*Snowglobe$3.4511/30/22
*Tealight$2.3711/30/22
*Board Game$3.781/4/23
*Painter’s puzzle$3.781/30/23
*Roblox characters$5.941/30/23
*New Hard Drive$5.942/9/23
*Logitech Ergonomic Mouse 1$10.272/9/23
*Antique? vase$8.112/21/23
*DVD$2.153/1/23
*Coffee Maker$7.353/3/23
*Teapot$5.943/3/23
*Sony Receiver$27.702/28/233/6/23$12.30
Underinvested $85.81
Total inventory amount$197.26
*Indicates purchased from Profit

February 24, 2023 – Sale and Inventory


I bought a vase on February 21st for $8.11 and am doing more research to find out if it could be a more valuable piece. I will need to take it to someone that has more expertise than me, but based on what I found online it looks promising it could be a real. If it is not, I think I can still double my money on what I paid for it.

I also made a sale on February 24th of the higher price item I bought a little over a month ago with the profit from the coffee grinder. I ended up making $13.79 in profit off of the piece of music equipment after I paid $43.30 for it. I made close to 32% on this flip in under two months. This is a good amount of profit to add into what I made off the coffee grinder previously in addition to the other items I got from the profit of it.

Music Equipment sold 2/24/23

I’m going to look for an item that I can put all the money from the piece of equipment music into that I can hopefully double up on. If I can do this, it would get into a nice hourly rate of over $50. At this level flipping becomes a very interesting endeavor, if the are multiple items in this range in my inventory.

I am on a really good run of selling inventory much quicker than I have from my historical averages over the past. I’m not sure why this is, but I’m going to take a guess as to why. At the level I’ve bought most of my items which have sold I’ve been able to know I would be the lowest price compared to other sellers. This is the best advantage to have in my experience. People are more cost conscious than anything you can try to differentiate at the price point I’m currently selling at. I’ve also been lucky in finding items which have had high demand to help move them quickly.

The last factor is some luck. I can understand a lot about flipping, but sometimes you need to be able to find some high-priced items when you show up to look for things. A little luck thrown in the mix makes the knowledge of what I’m doing easier to have some outsized returns quicker than I’ve expected.

I’ve got almost $90 to reinvest right now, which is a large amount compared to what I started off with. One and two dollar puzzles as my go to are looking like they could be moving into the past as the main item to build up anymore for me. I need to think about what the next item price point I need to be at. I want to stay around 30 items in my inventory and I am at $184 of potential inventory value overall. With the larger item having sold again and knowing I’m going to try and reinvest all of it into one item that may be the strategy I try to do moving forward with each sell. This could put me into a weird position though if I’m looking to exactly invest a very specific amount into the next item each time. I’ll think about what I’m going to do more and update once I’ve bought some items. I may try to bulk a bunch of the items I bought at lower cost and try to sell them all at once to keep myself around thirty items and take the additional profit I have into higher priced inventory. I am really not sure right now, but here is to some more good luck moving forward.

Current Inventory

ItemCostDate PurchasedSoldProfit
Ireland Puzzle$3.456/27/22
NFL Puzzle$2.376/27/22
Animal puzzle #1$1.186/29/22
Animal puzzle #2$1.186/29/22
Iowa Puzzle$1.186/29/22
3 Hole Punch$1.186/29/22
Serving Dish and Bowl$9.297/20/22
*Star Wars Puzzle$2.377/25/22
*2 Hot Wheels$2.108/3/22
Star Wars Puzzle$1.188/31/22
Animal Puzzle$1.188/31/22
Animal Puzzle$1.188/31/22
*2 Coca Cola Puzzles$6.919/13/22
*Christmas Coffee Cup$1.189/13/22
*Stapler and Stapler remover$.549/26/22
*Floral Plate$2.719/26/22
*Old Spice Cologne bottle$3.259/26/22
*Wood block set- kid’s toy$2.179/26/22
*Japanese Stein 1$3.259/26/22
*Japanese Stein 2$4.339/26/22
*One, two, three infinity$1.0710/19/22
*Satellite Puzzle$2.3711/28/22
*Snowglobe$3.4511/30/22
*Tealight$2.3711/30/22
*Board Game$3.781/4/23
*Music Equipment$43.301/4/232/24/23$13.79
*Painter’s puzzle$3.781/30/23
*Roblox characters$5.941/30/23
*New Hard Drive$5.942/9/23
*Logitech Ergonomic Mouse 1$10.272/9/23
*Antique? vase$8.112/21/23
Underinvested $88.95
Total inventory amount$184.96
*Indicates purchased from Profit

February 19, 2023 – 3 More Sales


I sold three items over the past weekend. This is many more than I would expect to sale in a typical period, but the computer-based items moved quickly like I thought they would. Also, I sold an item, the advertising magazine, I have had for a while in addition to two of the mice I bought. It looks like I took it off previously when it was bought and not paid for. I re-added it to the inventory to show it.

Ergonomic mouse

The items that sold all at least double the money that I had paid for them. The first mouse made $10.24 on $8.11, the second made $18.00 on $8.11, and the magazine made $7.69 on $2.17. Overall, $35.93 on three items which cost me $18.39 and turned into $54.32. This almost tripled the amount I put into these three items overall. The return on these items was 295%.

The annual return for the two mice can be calculated but is so ridiculously high the number received doesn’t make any sense from an annual return basis, because to be able to find something which will sell every nine days in excess of doubling is part luck and part skill in flipping. To understand this the annual return on the mouse which I paid $8.11 for and made $18 in profit would be the following calculation. $18 divided by $8.11 equals 2.26 times the cost paid. 365 days divided by 9 days equals a turnover rate of 40.55 times in a year. The turnover rate is the part which is unobtainable on a consistent basis. This would then assume you could reinvest the new amount and make 2.26 times at each turnover. You would be able to increase your $8.11 to an amount that would be worth more than everything in the world currently, $1.8 quadrillion.

To understand this further look at how quickly the $8.11 grows in just ten flips.

Starting AmountProfit at 2.26 timesNew Ending AmountFlip Number
$8.11$18.00$26.111
$26.11$59.00$85.112
$85.11$192.35$277.463
$277.46$627.06$904.524
$904.52$2044.21$2948.735
$2948.73$6664.13$9,612.866
$9,612$21,725$31,3377
$31,337$70,821$102,1588
$102,158$230,877$333,0359
$333,035$752,659$1,085,69410
2.26 times growth in ten flips

Having $8.11 grow to over $1,000,000 in ten flips would require so much luck to be able to make this happen. Add it that you would do this in 90 days, or three months then you can understand how unrealistic this is. The higher the amount of the item you are trying flip the harder it is to get a multiple like 2.26 times your investment and the higher the risk you are taking to make this amount of return that quickly. It could happen to get this type of return, but it would take longer for this to happen.

I am currently underinvested by $38.92 and will update once I’ve got new items to replace this. This was a good week for flipping for me. I went from being overinvested by $17 to underinvested by $38. The power of flipping small amounts keeps on being shown over time. I be at $171 of inventory once I have the new items, I need which puts me at an inventory of 4.7 times my initial investment. It looks like I will have 5 times the amount I started with when less than one year is done since I started.

Current Inventory

ItemCostDate PurchasedSoldProfit
Ireland Puzzle$3.456/27/22
NFL Puzzle$2.376/27/22
Animal puzzle #1$1.186/29/22
Animal puzzle #2$1.186/29/22
Iowa Puzzle$1.186/29/22
3 Hole Punch$1.186/29/22
Serving Dish and Bowl$9.297/20/22
*Star Wars Puzzle$2.377/25/22
*2 Hot Wheels$2.108/3/22
Star Wars Puzzle$1.188/31/22
Animal Puzzle$1.188/31/22
Animal Puzzle$1.188/31/22
*2 Coca Cola Puzzles$6.919/13/22
*Christmas Coffee Cup$1.189/13/22
*Stapler and Stapler remover$.549/26/22
*Floral Plate$2.719/26/22
*Advertising Magazine$2.179/26/22$7.692/19/23
*Old Spice Cologne bottle$3.259/26/22
*Wood block set- kid’s toy$2.179/26/22
*Japanese Stein 1$3.259/26/22
*Japanese Stein 2$4.339/26/22
*One, two, three infinity$1.0710/19/22
*Satellite Puzzle$2.3711/28/22
*Snowglobe$3.4511/30/22
*Tealight$2.3711/30/22
*Board Game$3.781/4/23
*Music Equipment$43.301/4/23
*Painter’s puzzle$3.781/30/23
*Roblox characters$5.941/30/23
*New Hard Drive$5.942/9/23
*Logictech Wireless Mouse 1$8.112/9/232/17/23$18.00
*Logitech Ergonomic Mouse 1$10.272/9/23
*Microsoft Ergonomic Mouse 2$8.112/9/232/17/23$10.24
Underinvested $38.92
Total inventory amount$132.25
*Indicates purchased from Profit