It's always fun coming up with creative ways to raise money. This time around I decided to have a yard sale. A musician friend and I are going on tour next year to Europe!! We're super excited and a little overwhelmed on how we're going to afford the trip. So we put our heads together and came up with the idea for a yard sale to raise funds. We asked our friends and family to donate their used and not-so-used items for us to sell. We ended up with a LOT of stuff. Desks, lamps, candles, clothes, shoes, jewelry, hats, decorative items, dishes, a bed, and the list goes on. There were a lot of people donating things so we decided to get a U-haul truck to go around town picking up the items. Rob and I had fun touring the city through the front seat of a U-haul truck. We even stopped at a grocery store that evening, picked up a few food items, and had a picnic in a park on our way to our last two stops. We found a way to enjoy ourselves in the midst of all that heavy lifting! :)
After having so much fun in the park we decided to make that a weekly event and bring our instruments to play also. I may be blogging about that soon!
For our European Tour next year, we're planning a week long trek through Europe staring in London and working our way through Spain, Germany, Belgium, France, Greece and maybe even Switzerland. It's where ever the wind takes us at this point as we're still ironing out our plans. This will be my first time going to Europe. I'm so blessed that God is taking me there through my career in music!
The yard sale was a success according to the average financial results of a typical yard sale. I had lofty goals in my head of how much we wanted to raise and we made about a third of that I guess. *Sigh.
We have a lot of stuff left over and we're going to have another yard sale to see if we can pick up a few more couple hundred dollars in a few months. We'll see.
Next time around we'll have a better idea of sign/marketing, pricing strategy and how to negotiate at a yard sale to get the best results. :)
