Hello all! And welcome to week 11 of the money mental earnings challenge! This week has been my most challenging week of the challenge so far. I’ve been experiencing the unwanted joy of returns this week, mostly due to my own fault in making mistakes in my listings. For those of you are unfamiliar with the challenge and what I’m trying to achieve you may want to start off by reading this post here.

The target is to make £430 a month to cover the costs of my car loan, car insurance, and road tax. Each week I will be reporting on my progress towards this monthly challenge. I’ll be using a variety of different sources to earn money details of which I’ve written about in this post here.

If you want to see how I did in the last week of the challenge you can find out by clicking here.

Each week I’ll give a breakdown of what I’ve earned and how I’ve earned it before. As previously mentioned my main source of income to support the challenge will be buying and selling goods on eBay so for reporting purposes I will include details of what items I sold on eBay, how much it cost me, how much I sold it for and how much profit I made after fees. The last figure will be rounded down to the nearest 50p for ease.

So without further ado here’s week 11!

eBay:

As mentioned in this week’s challenge I’ve had some returns so for the first time ever I’m going to start the week with a minus figure. There are two items I’ve had returned this week, with one still waiting to come back. Therefore I’m going to start with a figure of -18.48. Can I battle back and recoup my losses? Read on to find out!

Toca 2 Touring Cars – Cost £0.33 from a charity shop, sold for £6.99 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £4

1080 Snowboarding N64 Cartridge only – came as part of a bundle of an N64 console and games with the console having already sold for a huge profit so this is a freebie (cost £0.00), sold for £5 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £2.50

Medieval Total War Battle Collection – Cost £0.10 from a house clearance shop, sold for £8.99 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £6

Brand New Marvel Avengers Hulk vs Sub Ultron mini figures – Cost £1.99 from Home Bargains, sold for £9.49 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £3

Despicable Me Purple Minion 2 foot tall – Cost £1.99 from my favourite charity shop (Barnados in case anyone was wondering), sold for £17.99 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £9.50 (Finally after item number 5 has sold I’m back in profit. It just goes to show how badly just two returns can affect your profit figures)

Power the game vintage board game sealed contents but damaged box, Cost £1.49 from my favourite charity shop, sold for £14.99 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £8.50

Bloom Fresco high chair  -cost 10.83 from an eBay auction, sold for £19.99 collection only on an eBay auction. Total profit after fees: £6.50 (this should have sold for a lot more but it was taking up so much space that I decided to put in an auction for a quick profit so that I could free up the space and the capital).

New and sealed Swissie Women’s Ultavite Pills, box of 4 – cost £3.16 from Home Bargains, sold for £12.99 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £5

Brother Bear VHS – cost £0.05 as part of a bundle of videos I picked up from another reseller (which I’m well into profit on), sold for £10.49 including shipping. Total profit after fees £6

Brand New Power Rangers Ninja Steel Blaster – Cost £6.50 from Morrisons, sold for £16.99 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £5

New and sealed Game of Phones game – Cost £5.40 from the Debenham sale, sold for £23.99 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £12.50

New and sealed Swissie Women’s Ultavite Pills, box of 4 – cost £3.16 from Home Bargains, sold for £13.99 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £6 (I’ve put the price up on these after the first batch sold as eBay gives multi-quantity listings a boost in the rankings when they start selling).

New and sealed Star Wars BB-8 Duvet set – Cost £2.50 from Asda, sold for £9.50 including shipping. Total profit after fees: £2.50 (An amazing piece of retail arbitrage I bought two of these initially intending to keep hold of them until the next Star Wars as they had a price of £6 in the sale. However, they scanned at £2.50 at the till so I went back and purchased loads more. I sold the first one cheaply in order to give the listing a boost so that I make bigger profits on the remaining load).

New and sealed XLS medical weight loss power 10 sachets – Cost £2.99 from Home Bargains, sold for £9.99 including shipping. Total profit after fees £4.50. (Another multi-quanity listing where I’ve put the price up by a pound following the first order).

Total eBay income: £63.01. My worst ever week on eBay since the challenge began. However, I’ve still made a profit and Retail Arbitrage is something that’s worked really well for me this week. Careful research, competitive pricing and buying in bulk in this space is now starting to really pay off and so this is something that I expect to be doing a lot more of in the future.

Facebook:

I’ve had no sales on Facebook this week.

Total Facebook income: £0.00

Other income:

Citizenme App: £0.44

Qmee: £0.40

Total Other Income: £0.84 (before I started on eBay I used to clear £500-600 a month from other income but it used to take up a lot more of my time!).

Week 11 total income: £63.85

So the worst week of the challenge so far is over. I made a lot less money than I would have liked even if there had been no refunds issued. However, I always knew that January was going to bring with it tough trading conditions for the type of products I sell so I’m not too disappointed by this. I’ve added some additional lines this month to the store in new markets to compensate for this over the last week or so which will hopefully start to show in next weeks earnings challenge report.

Adding this week’s figures to last week’s figure of £163 gives me a total of £226.85 so I’m still on course to hit the £430 earnings target which is the most pleasing aspect of this update. I’ve two more weeks to hit the target and I’m still feeling confident about this (especially as at the time of writing I’ve already had two sales for week 3 just a few hours into the week!).

If you’ve enjoyed reading this post why not take a look at the Geordie Grandma’s blog? She posts regular updates on her eBay sales including one that you can find by clicking here.

Thanks for reading.

Andrew