Lessons in value from selling my stuff at a car boot sale

Oh and should I bring this newsletter back?

Cartoon by Lèo Hamelin

This past Sunday, I sold a load of my old stuff at a car boot sale. 

Watching strangers pick through my things in front of me, and then mostly walk away from it, was a humbling experience. It taught me some hard truths about what “value” really means.

Now, I don’t have a problem purging my belongings; if anything I enjoy the lightness (and smugness) a good declutter brings me. It’s the physical removal of the items from my home that I struggle with. The part where you have to take your “get rid of” pile out of the door and banish it from your life. I find this difficult not for sentimental reasons; but rather because of how confronting I find it to dispose of unwanted items.

I try to recycle as much as possible, but in order for me to do that properly, that means a trip to the dump where I’m confronted with endless piles of rubbish that can’t be reused or recycled. I do take things to the charity shop, but I never really know what happens to them. As for selling online, I find it to be inconsistent – you might get a decent price, but you can’t guarantee when the items will actually exit your house. 

So when my friend asked me to do a car boot sale with her, I was keen. I thought way this way, I’d feel better knowing that I’d get a glimpse of the new home my stuff was going to (and I’d get a little cash for my effort).

A quick PSA for my American readers: a car boot is like a yard sale, except you sell stuff out of the trunk of your car, along with hundreds of other people. And that last part is important. Hoards of people were flogging an astonishing amount of junkstuff at 7 AM on a Sunday in a suburban school car park.  

So as far as trying to turn a blind to the impact of consumerism and waste, that didn’t happen. Which, while uncomfortable, was ultimately a good thing. At some point during the day, my friend said how eye-opening she’d found the experience of seeing the sheer volume people were trying to get rid of and how it would make her think twice before her next purchase.

We got there shortly after the doors opened to the public. The seasoned car booters spotted us a mile off and swarmed us. Before I could even start unpacking my wares, a guy who radiated Del Boy vibes appeared as if out of nowhere and asked me if I had any jewellery. As it happened, I had a small box and I told him that in there was a diamond ring.

He took out a pocket loupe and inspected it, asking what I wanted for it. I said he could have it for £20. We haggled a bit; he also wanted a silver necklace and offered £20 for the lot. I said “no” to that and he handed over two tenners and left with just the ring.

I don’t know what the face value of that ring was, but definitely a lot more than £20. So why on earth did I sell it so cheaply?

An ex-boyfriend gave me the ring when we were 18. He’d bought it from a vintage jewellery shop; it had two white gold bands braided together, one with tiny diamonds set in it. We broke up about a year later and the ring has sat in its box ever since. That’s nearly 15 years of carting around a ring that I don’t particularly like, from a person who belongs in a past life. 

Could I have sold it for a lot more than £20? Definitely. But I haven’t managed to do that in 15 years. As dumb as this sounds, doing the work to sell the ring for what it was actually worth wasn’t worth as much to me as just being rid of it.

It reminds me of the analogy of the guy who bought 25 cents for a dollar. In my book, You’re The Business, I wrote about a definition of value that I learned from the futurist Max Borders’ writing. Time, perspective and context all influence our individual perception of the value of something. To illustrate the point, Borders asks you to imagine a guy in a laundromat who needs to dry his trousers in time for an important meeting, but is short a quarter. Someone comes in and he pays them a dollar in exchange for one quarter. At that moment, holding his wet trousers and with no other options, a quarter was worth a lot more than 25 cents to him.

Similarly just in reverse, selling that diamond ring quickly and painlessly and thus unburdening myself from its emotional weight, was worth more to me than the fiscal value of the ring.

I learned so much at that car boot sale, too much to clutter your inbox with right now. But here’s the final list of everything I sold and for how much because I don’t know, I think it’s kind of fascinating? 

• The diamond ring – £20

• A Nutri-Bullet that I don’t use anymore – £15

• A handbag I don’t use anymore – £2

• A silver necklace from a different ex – £5

• A document holder, a plastic cup, a Christmas toy and a garden decoration – £2.30

• An unused laptop case and unused pan organiser – £3

• A wooden laundry basket – £2

• Two watches; one designer I bought off eBay years ago and one I wore in my 20s – £12

• A designer keychain I won in a raffle – £5

• A silver charm I got as a present in my early 20s that I never used – £2

• A handmade fancy dress costume I used to wear to festivals – £5 

• What didn’t sell: a wooden table, a 1,000-piece Christmas puzzle and a bunch of clothes

What is a car boot sale but not the original marketplace? People come to buy and sell. Duh! Personally, I think everyone should do one at some point in their life and have their eyes opened about how we think about our stuff, its cost and worth. It was also a great lesson in how I approach pricing as a self-employed writer, but that’s for another day. Maybe.

I want to end by saying that for all the philosophical lessons I learned, it was also just a great day out! My friend and I gossiped over tea in styrofoam cups; I ate the best egg sandwich of my life from the burger van, and we spoke to a parade of captivating characters. By the end of the day, I’d made £70. That’s not a life-changing amount of money but what other activity can you do with a pal where you can eat, drink and chat, and leave with more money and less stuff than you started with? Priceless, if you ask me.

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If you’re wondering…..

So to address the elephant in your inbox…. does this mean this newsletter is back? Honestly, I don’t know.

Six months ago I sent out a very dramatic email announcing that I was done writing it. It wasn’t working for me anymore so it was time to bow out.

Well, I’ve really missed it. To the point where I just had to write this random vignette about a car boot sale and see how it landed.

So please, let me know: Should I bring this thing back? If I did, what would you want to hear from me about? What is it about this newsletter you like enough to keep reading it? Humour me:

Now would also be a good time to UNSUBSCRIBE. Because I can’t tell you what this newsletter will look like if I do bring it back.

If you originally signed up for my newsletter because you wanted to learn about freelancing and/or writing, here are some people doing that really well:

• Writerland: My favourite Substack! Based on the radical idea that writing doesn’t have to be painful.

• Freelance Writing Jobs: The only newsletter you need to get all the gigs. If you pay for a subscription, you get priority access to the mailouts a day early.

• Notes From a Hired Pen: Jen A. Miller is my freelance icon and her newsletter, while irregular, is gold dust

• Freelancing With Tim: This is perhaps the closest example of what the OG Professional Freelancer used to be like. Tim has some excellent content for freelance journalists from his years working as an NYT editor

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🤓 WTF I’ve been doing since I last emailed you

• I wrote about voice notes for Business Insider

• I interviewed a bunch of Excel influencers who are making money selling spreadsheet courses on TikTok

• I’m wrapping up a mentorship programme through the IWMF – if you speak Spanish, subscribe to my mentee’s brilliant newsletter for and about the Puerto Rican diaspora

• Speaking of newsletters, I’ve been developing newsletter strategies for clients. Including launching a newsletter about design, research and change for a fab B-Corp design agency

• I had a great time hosting a workshop for a tech company about how they can work better with journalists

• After 2.5 years, I finally got Covid. (I’m fine now)

Books I read and loved:

• Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

• Fault Lines by Emily Itami

• Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou

• Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

• The Mystery of Mercy Close by Marian Keyes

Shows I watched and loved:

• The Walk-In on ITV

• One Tree Hill (watched it all the way through for the first time!)

• Ridley on ITV

Podcast recommendations

• We Were Three (NYT/Serial)

• The new season of Heavyweight (Gimlet)

Okay byeeee!