If you’ve got no product, no money and bills stacking up, this is your chapter. Nothing in here needs a website, a niche, or a following. It needs a Saturday.
3.1 Sell your stuff
Facebook Marketplace, Gumtree and eBay. Photograph it, price it, list it, sell it.
I know the two objections because I’ve said both of them myself. “People don’t have money to buy it, Poida.” And “I won’t get what it’s worth.”
Let me tell you about my first Harley.
It was my brother’s bike. He passed away. I was a single dad of two with no money for food, and I had to sell it for half what it was worth. It hurt. It hurt for a long time.
But I ate, my kids ate, and I got through the next few months. And it felt really good the day I paid cash for the Wide Glide. Picked up a Buell not long after. Got my eye on a Road King when the weather warms up.
Sell it. You can buy it back later, and the version of you that buys it back isn’t broke.
Here’s the thing about “not what it’s worth”: people always have money for a bargain. A basement price moves today. A fair price sits there for six weeks while you stress about the electricity bill. You’re not selling an asset, you’re buying breathing room.
And a trick I’ve used more than once — ask a mate to buy it at a bargain price with a handshake that you’ll buy it back off him later. Works if it’s a good mate.
Getting a fast sale
- Photos in daylight, against a plain background, at least six of them, including the flaws. Honest listings sell faster and get fewer time-wasters.
- Search the completed/sold listings for the same item to see what people actually paid, not what they’re asking.
- Price it 15–20% under the going rate and say “first in, best dressed, no holds.” That sentence does a lot of work.
- List Thursday night. Weekend browsers, weekend cash.
- Meet in a public place, daylight, take someone with you. Many police stations have a designated safe exchange spot. Cash or bank transfer that has actually cleared — screenshots of transfers are trivially faked.
Whatever you’re holding on to that turns into cash, while you’ve got stress in your life from a lack of cash — that’s a no-brainer, right?
3.2 Free stuff is money lying around
Keep your eyes open. Facebook’s free groups, Gumtree’s free section, hard rubbish collection week, and the “free to good home” posts.
I once found free lawn. A whole trailer of fresh turf rolls, free. I asked if I could borrow the trailer to get it home — “yeah, no worries mate.” Drove it 7km and sold it as freshly laid lawn to a bloke building in a new estate for $900. Cheap, for him. Win-win.
A fellow Bogan found his calling in the Gumtree jobs section — caretaker for a caravan resort park by the beach. He packed up and went. Yep, this is for me.
Kerbside hard rubbish rules vary by council — some allow scavenging, some don’t. Check your council’s page. And if you’re going to make a habit of buying to resell, that’s a business: ABN, and declare it. See Chapter 1.
3.3 Markets beat garage sales
Bogans don’t recommend garage sales. It weirds us out having strangers at our place going through our stuff.
Sunday markets have long been the Bogan favourite. Once a month in most areas. Find gear to flog off — fishing tackle, old tools, old plates, bric-a-brac, army surplus, quality kids’ clothes, costume jewellery, vinyl records, and plants. All hits. The $2 to $5 range moves all day.
The plant cutting story
Me mate’s olds are two pensioners. They took a cutting off the neighbour’s plant, grew it in a little plastic pot, and sold it for $2 at the Sunday markets.
Then they did what we teach at Bogan School. Rinse and repeat.
They ended up with a proper range of plants, all suited to the local climate, all flogged off at the markets. A couple of hours in the garden through the week, then out on the weekend with the station wagon and the marquee. No EFTPOS, no cheques. Their favourite question, every single time: “How much for cash?”
Locals came. Old fellas came. Young couples building their first home came, needing something for the garden that wouldn’t die.
Then over one summer they’d built a genuine hundred-percent-cash business with a name in the community — and they sold the whole thing to a cashed-up Bogan pensioner who could see how easy it was. Flashed some cash, everybody won again.
Someone needed lawn. I found lawn. I found that person. Fixed their problem. Got money.
People building a new home needed plants. They had good, sturdy, local plants. Wife’s happy, which fixes the husband’s problem. They got money.
Rinse and repeat. That’s the entire book in two stories.
3.4 Flipping, properly
Once you’ve sold your own stuff, the natural next step is selling other people’s. Buy low, sell right.
| What to look for | Why it works |
|---|---|
| Items listed with no photos or one bad photo | They’re underpriced because they look like junk. Better photos, better price. |
| Listings with typos in the brand name | Nobody’s finding them in search. You will. |
| Tools, especially older Australian and German brands | Built to last, always in demand, easy to test and describe. |
| End-of-lease and moving-house listings | Deadline pressure means a real discount for cash today. |
| Anything needing a $15 part and half an hour | That half hour is the whole margin. |
- Never buy something you can’t test or don’t understand.
- Don’t touch anything with a serial number filed off, and don’t buy tools out of the back of a van at a price that makes no sense. Receiving stolen goods is a criminal offence and “I didn’t know” isn’t much of a defence.
- Second-hand electrical goods you sell must be safe. Test-and-tag if you’re doing volume.
- Keep a simple record of what you paid and what you sold it for. That’s your profit, and it’s assessable income.
3.5 Selling your time this week
Not glamorous, but it’s cash in days:
- Airtasker — assembly, removals, cleaning, deliveries, odd jobs. Money within the week, and it builds a public rating you can point at.
- Mowing and yard clean-ups. A trailer, a mower and a whipper snipper is a business. Drop 50 flyers in the letterboxes of the streets with the longest grass.
- Rideshare and delivery. Low margin, but instant and flexible.
- Pet sitting and dog walking via Mad Paws or the local Facebook group.
- Scrap metal. Old batteries, copper, aluminium. Check the yard’s rates first — they’re not all the same.
None of this is the dream. It’s not meant to be. It’s the bridge that gets you from panicking about Thursday’s bill to having enough headspace to build the stuff in Chapters 4 through 7. Get the money, get your head straight, then build.
Your seven-day cash plan
- Today: walk the house with a notepad. List everything you haven’t touched in twelve months.
- Tonight: photograph the top ten and list five on Marketplace.
- Day 2–3: list the rest, and sign up to Airtasker.
- Day 4: book a stall at the next local market, or ask a mate who has one if you can share it.
- Day 5–7: answer messages fast, meet safely, bank the money into the business account from Chapter 1.
- Then: put a set percentage of it aside and go start Chapter 4.