006: How To Make Money Flipping When You’re Broke And Have Zero Dollars
Shownotes:
I get it. You don’t have money to spend on flipping. You’re broke. Should you give up? No! I’ll show you how to make money flipping things FOR FREE. And become successful — even if you’re starting out with little or no money using your energy, time, and creativity
Quotes:
“Either you’re gonna make excuses or you’re gonna make money, but you can’t do both.”
“You have to always, always, always remember. Always remind yourself. Keep telling yourself: everything sells. Everything sells. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I don’t care if you walk into a thrift store and you see an ugly living room chair that’s purple from the seventies. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I don’t care if your best friend doesn’t like it and thinks it’s ugly. It doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is what the market is willing to pay for it.”
“You can make $600 in one week, or you can make $600 in one month. The only difference between the guy who makes $600 in a month and the guy who makes $600 in a week, is how fast he can post the items. How fast he can recycle his inventory. How quickly he can get things on the market. Speed is everything. Speed is life or death.”
“…at first, if you don’t have money, you can’t leverage your money. You’re gonna have to leverage something else, which is your energy and time. And the FREE section of Craigslist is a perfect place to do it. Let’s say you picked up that old printer and posted it for $50 bucks. …You just made $50 bucks from just 25 minutes of your time: driving to pick it up, coming back, posting it up for sale. How much longer are you going to postpone getting started with flipping?”
Want me to answer your questions about flipping, side hustles, marketing, entrepreneurship, personal development, motivation, mindset, lifestyle — or anything else?
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What To Do Next
LOVE FLIPPING AND WANT TO LEARN MORE MONEY-MAKING AND MARKETING SECRETS? READY TO EARN 1K ON THE SIDE? HERE ARE SOME NEXT STEPS…
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Full Episode Transcript
00:00 Music 00:53 What’s up guys? The Flipping Ninja is here to show you how to make thousands and thousands of dollars buying, selling, and flipping things on Craigslist, E-Bay and Thrift Stores. 01:11 So, today’s discussion is going to be how to start flipping things with zero dollars. Zero. Nothing. You could do it, it’s possible and I’ve done it. I’ve showed people how to do it, and I’ve walked people through making money from thin air from scratch, remotely from across the country, meaning I would talk to somebody on the phone. I would look at their market and I would also look at local Craigslist postings. Then I would tell them exactly what to do, where to drive, what to pick up, what to do to repost it, how much to repost it for, how to take photos, what to write in the ad description. Bam! Publish it, post it. Boom! 01:59 Sold for a profit. They just made cash out of no monetary investment, but strictly a time and energy and creativity investment and that’s what the Flipping Ninja is all about. I really wanted to create a place for you basically, a methodology that’s easy for you to remember and master. If you’re somebody who thinks you need money to get started, then you don’t have a money problem. What you do have is a mindset problem, meaning there’s so many creative ways to make money and get started and leverage not your money, because you may not have money but your time, your energy and your creativity. So, if you look on Craigslist, the free section. 02:51 If you pull up Craigslist for your city right now, within fifteen seconds, I guarantee you’ll find three items that you could pick up and sell for a profit. Meaning you didn’t pay any money upfront. You just simply go pick them up, repost them following specific guidelines. You really want to take high quality photos and write the ad properly, and I will go over that in my flipping ninja blueprint of how to write ads that sell. I actually have templates included for you so that you don’t have to do the groundwork of coming up with something. You simply take your photos, fill in the blanks and post it. If you want to start making massive profits, you’re going to have to learn to be fast because speed is the game here fast beat the big. So, if you can pick up all these items, the faster you can post them, the faster they’ll sell, the quicker you’ll be clearing up your inventory. 03:57 So that you can go and get more stuff and just keep the cycle going. For example, you can make six hundred dollars in one week, or you can make that same six hundred dollars in one month. 04:10 The only difference between the guy who makes six hundred in one month and the guy who makes a six hundred a week depends on how fast he can post the items, how fast he can recycle his inventory, how quickly you can get things on the market. So, you can start flipping things with zero dollars down. Something you can go into right now to get started easily is pull up Craigslist, look at the free section and simply look at everything. It could be a dishwasher, it could be a table, it could be a TV. A lot of people like to get rid of their older TVs just because everyone’s got flat screens these days, and when you look at the items on the free section, you cannot look at them from the perspective of whether or not you like the item or not. 05:05 Okay, it’s not about what you like. Just because you feel that an old GPS navigation system is obsolete because everybody has smartphones today, does not mean that there’s people out there who are specifically looking for a GPS unit like a straight up old school style. One time there was a GPS unit that one of my friends got, while we were at a thrift store together. There was a GPS unit that was selling for I think it was a Garmin or a Magellan. Either way, they were pretty pricey back when they came out, those GPS units that you put in your car and the GPS unit was for four dollars. It is fully functional; it had a GPS and had all the maps and had a speedometer that shows you how fast you’re going, and it shows the date and time. So, she got a standard GPS unit four dollars. She was hesitant at first and I told her it’s four dollars and there’s no way you’re going to lose money on that deal. So, I told her to get it. 06:23 She got it. She posted it up and six days later, this guy calls her and he’s like, ‘oh my god do you still have the GPS unit I really want it’ and she’s like, ‘Yes, I do’ and she posted it for thirty-five dollars. So basically, the guy was extremely stoked. He was like, ‘Oh my God, I really want to buy it. Please save it for me. ‘Is it sold and when can I come get it?’ So, they met, and she sold it to him. The reason he really wanted this GPS unit wasn’t even because of the GPS use. It was because his speedometer on his car had went out and he was looking for a GPS speedometer because that GPS had a speedometer on it. That shows how fast you’re driving, and that’s what he was after. This guy was freaking creative, he’s getting a fricking GPS speedometer that is state of the art. 07:19 So anyway, he bought it and she made a profit. So back to investing or trying to flip items with zero are very low dollars. You go on the Craigslist section; you can’t look at items from your eyes. You have to look at items from the market’s eyes, and there’s two rules that I discussed in the blueprint that you will have to live by, and you will have to do business by. Basically, if you follow these two rules, it’s probably going to TEN X your profits throughout the whole year. 07:59 In general, if you follow these two rules, you’re going to make thousands of more dollars than if you didn’t. I want you to live by these two rules on your flipping journey. So, rule number one is, you have to always remind yourself that everything sells. I don’t care if you don’t like it, I don’t care if you walk into a thrift store and you see an ugly living room chair that’s purple, that’s from the seventies. I don’t care if your best friend doesn’t like it and thinks it’s ugly. 08:45 It doesn’t matter what you think, what matters is what the market is willing to pay for it, so you should be getting that chair. You shouldn’t be cutting it out, now imagine going through your journey, going through Craigslist, Thrift Store’s and E-Bay with a closed mind. 09:07 Versus going into it with what we call the eye for the deal, which means looking at things from the market’s perspective. You suddenly expand your pipeline and exploit so many more markets. Not only that, you’re serving so many more people because you’re going through more variety of items. So, when you’re looking at the free section of Craigslist, the reason most people don’t think that they could do it is because they’re still looking at the items from that very limited viewpoint through the narrow lens. 09:49 They think just because they wouldn’t take it home for themselves, they think it’s not something that others will buy. So, you must remember the first rule, about keep telling yourself everything sells. 10:07 We’re not talking about how much it’s going to sell for. You could make two hundred dollars on it or you could make twenty. But the fact is, everything sells. There’s someone somewhere who is going to buy that product, it might not be for the price that you want, but that doesn’t change the fact that everything sells. Okay, so that’s rule number one, and rule number two ties directly in with Rule number one. Once you realize and truly believe and understand that everything sells, you have to execute rule number two which is to have the confidence to buy. 10:58 When I say buy, I also mean if you see something on the free section of Craigslist, you must have the courage to go pick it up for free. Don’t think that it’s not going to sell just because it has zero appeal to you, or you have zero knowledge on it. If you follow those two rules alone, basically you can make hundreds of dollars for the rest of your life if you want. Think about if you do this even a couple times for a month, you can make one hundred, two hundred, three hundred dollars a month. You’ve just created a second income stream for yourself. Just by following these two rules. Everything sells and have the confidence to buy. 11:48 So, it’s very important you remember that and when you’re browsing through the free section of Craigslist, look at everything. 11:57 You want to look at it with the eye for the deal and know that it’s going to sell. I can pull up the free section of Craigslist on any country, any city and basically make money, probably within hours or days. It’s really true because there’s so much out there, and you have to remember that I’m not looking at it from my perspective. There’s no need for me to have a random stainless-steel dishwasher and extra dishwashers sitting around my house. There’s no need for me to have an extra random old printer. This is targeted towards those people who are specifically looking to start with zero dollars or have no money to start, but they want to start. At first, if you don’t have money you can’t leverage your money. You’re going to have to leverage something else, which is your energy and time. Therefore, the free section of Craigslist is a perfect place to do it. Let’s say you’ve picked up that old printer you posted up for fifty bucks. 13:06 You’ve just made fifty dollars just from twenty-five minutes of your time driving to pick it up and coming back and posting it. Even if you have to settle for less, I mean, you have to start somewhere, right? So, go get that free printer that you find or that free old TV posted up for fifteen dollars. You’ve just made fifteen dollars that you can use to leverage on your next deal and just keep growing. So, there is power in the free section of Craigslist and I’m giving you small examples, but even as someone who spends money to buy something and flips it for more. 13:45 Don’t disregard the free section of Craigslist as there are so many deals from which I’ve made hundreds of dollars from. There are so many things I got that I flipped, for example there’s a red couch that I picked up from where someone was moving, and they only wanted someone to go pick it up and take it. I happened to have a pickup truck that I bought for the flipping business. It is super useful, and I recommend if you can’t afford a pickup truck keep flipping things until you can buy a cheap one. It’ll eventually pay for itself, but anyway, going back to the red couch on Craig’s list, that I saw immediately and I’m like, ‘Okay, it’s a micro fiber red couch with crappy photos’ but, I saw potential right away. I’m like, ‘hey, it’s free’, then I got in my truck and go get it. Six days later, I sold it for two seventy-five dollars. So, think about it guys, that’s probably forty-five minutes tops time investment, and I think it was fifteen minutes away. 15:11 I picked it up. The crazy part about this flip that I did was I didn’t have to take it out of my pickup truck. I even took pictures of the couch while it was in the back of my pickup truck in my garage. Furthermore, I actually got the model of the couch and I found some stock photos of it online after which I saved. Then I post my ad with the photos that I enhanced. If you think about it, how are you going to sell a couch that is sitting in the back of a pickup truck? 16:03 That’s the thing guys, there’s an art to it. You’ve got to really get creative and sell that thing like crazy. You’ve got to enhance the pictures, take the right pictures, write the proper add description that really sells the product and appeals to people. Also, at the end of my ad, I offered free delivery. The fact that it’s free delivery completely closes the deal. Think about it, you’ve just moved into your first apartment and you’re browsing on Craigslist for a couch. Maybe you’re a college student or you can’t afford something too pricey. So, you’re just looking for something for your living room that’s completely empty, then you come across this beautiful red couch which is affordable and has free delivery. 17:02 I mean that immediately closes the deal. I know if I was in that position, I’d be like, Holy, this guy’s going to bring me the couch. Hell, yeah, I want it. 17:10 So, like I said, despite it being still in the back of my truck, I offered free delivery in my ad, and I priced it perfectly and immediately. It sold for two seventy-five, six days later and I had very little work on my side, besides putting the ad together. As far as loading and unloading when I went to pick up the couch, the guy actually helped me load it in the couch. It was super light and I dropped it off and help the buyer to load it into their place and it probably took ten minutes. That was it. I mean, bam two seventy-five and a deal like that is not a rare thing to happen. 17:54 That’s not something that’s unheard of, that’s if you’re constantly browsing the free section of Craigslist. You’re going to see deals like that all the time that you could jump on. I mean there’s no scarcity. There’s no lack of deals, there’s an abundance of deals and they’re constantly being posted. I read somewhere that deals are like buses and if you miss one, there’s always another one around the corner. There are constantly flowing and if you’re trying to get into the flipping business and you don’t have a lot of money, maybe you’re just like a college student or you don’t have much capital to invest in starting up. You can still get your foot in the game. 18:42 As long as you make that decision and follow those two rules, I mentioned. 18:47 Everything sells and you have the balls to buy, you’re going to put your foot in the door and not only that, there’s so much that could happen right then and there. For example, let’s say you do a couple deals and you finally make three hundred bucks in two weeks. Now you’ve got something to work with. Now you can use that three hundred and probably quadruple it if you play your cards right. That’s if you find the right deals, if you buy things slow and sell them for higher profits. So, at that point, you’ve got more power, you’ve got three hundred bucks, you’ve got more leverage, and the possibilities are endless. You can scale your business from there. So, yeah, I just wanted to quickly give you a talk on how to get started with zero dollars and give you some insights and tips you can try and work on that might help. Yeah, there’s so many more examples in my blueprint that I have. 19:47 There’s a document I put in there with almost every deal, there are hundreds of deals in there that I go through for free, paid for and just cool crazy finds. I try to post this as much as possible on here, but basically, I highly recommend it and it’s something that you want to jump on and really educate yourself so that you could take action fast, really get started. Even if you’re not ready for that, I want you to go on craigslist right now and look at the free section, see what you can pick up, see what you can find. See what you could flip and start making money because it’s real and it’s going to happen, and you can do it. 20:25 This has been the flipping Ninja podcast from the crew at the flippingninja.com. We believe that all Americans should be able to make their own money without having to rely on a job. If you’re ready to ditch the nine to five, visit the flippingninja.com and join our flipping Ninja Blueprint masterclass, where you’ll discover how to earn a reliable side income of one thousand to five thousand dollars a month living things with just five to ten hours a week. See, we’re on a mission to help one hundred thousand people earning one thousand dollars a month on the side, flipping things, working professionals, students, parents, men, women, artists, techies, entrepreneurs, introverts, total movies, you name it. Be a part of the revolution and blast out of living paycheck to paycheck once and for all at www.flippingninja.com until next time, remember you’re just one flip away from freedom. I want to make a difference. If you enjoyed today’s show, please pay it forward and head over to iTunes. Give us a rating and leave a review so others, just like you could benefit and take charge of their financial future. 21:23 Music. https://soundcloud.com/theflippingninja/006-how-to-make-money-flipping-when-youre-broke-and-have-zero-dollars
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