Motherhood and earning income sometimes feel like oil and water, they just simply don’t mix. Since the day my daughter was born, I have been trying to find the balance between not feeling like I am missing out on spending time with my kids and earning enough income to afford our family the advantages we want. I’ve learned that there is no exact formula for how Mom’s can easily fulfill the role of Mom and bring in an income. But even though I don’t have the answer for your particular household finances, I do have some great resources for earning income as a Mom.
I’m going to break this advice section out into a couple posts over the next month and feature different income earning resources to cover everything from selling your clothes to finding a steady income work from home job. But since we all have amasses a small salaries worth of clothes that, dare I say, might even have the tags still on them, I’ll start with the easiest of all Selling Clothes!
Top 3 Apps to Turn Your Old Clothes Into Fast Cash
Let’s face it, your laptop is collecting dust and as a busy mom work pretty much exclusively off your phone. All of these three recommendations are great for mobile and even have aps to make the whole process much easier to manage.
Poshmark:
This is a great way to sell clothes in your closet that you know have some value but you just aren’t wearing anymore. Consider this like ebay but selling to a more targeted and active audience of fashion lovers. I have only sold a few items (Lululemon) but had great success. Like, I sold them within 30 minutes, success!
Tips to Successful Selling on Poshmark
- Name brands like Lululemon and Free People are very popular. I don’t think I would even both trying to sell non name brands since the brand name is the simplest search feature.
- Take outstanding pictures – it makes all the difference for the purchaser
- Give as much detail as possible – measure the seams, take close ups, disclose as signs of wear
- Price it right – if you are on the fence about selling it then price is higher. But if you really are looking to earn some income and unload some clothes, price them to sell. Same principles as real estate, price the clothes to move because if they sit there longer there is social proof telling buyers that maybe they don’t want them either if no one else does.
- Nurture the Sale – as with any platform, what you get out of it is heavily tied into what you put into it. More participation creates more opportunity for views and potential sales.
- Money can be transferred to your account or a check can be mailed to you. Very easy to receive funds from your sale.
Ebay & Ebay Valet:
Ebay has always been a great place to sell anything, but it can be time consuming. For those of you who are short on free time but do want to unload stuff eBay Valet is a mom’s dream. Since everyone already knows how eBay works, here is the skinny on eBay Valet.
Basically the process is you send the ebBay valet a box of your stuff to sell and they put together a professional listing for you. There is a pre-approval process so you’ll have to snap a couple pics of what you intend to sell so they know that what you have is good enough to sell. But once you are approved it’s smooth sailing and out of sight out of mind until the sales take place.
There are no tips to sell on eBay Valet because the whole process is so turn key. But here are some tips if you want to build a little portfolio of your own eBay product listings.
Tips to Sell on eBay
- Primary photos should never be stock, show the actual product
- Use secondary images for stock images
- Take very good photos. Not just good quality in terms of pixels but good in terms of composition. No one wants to see your messy home, you want to show potential buyers that the goods are coming from a nice home, well taken care of and will be in good working order.
- Give full product details. Whatever details you can locate about the product online, include them. If you can find a SKU or product name, list it. That might just be how a buyer finds your product listing, by searching the product name on ebay or in Google.
- Provide a link. I always link out to the product listing wherever it is sold in retail. This lets the potential customer see verified details of everything I stated and get additional information they won’t have to email me questions about. Also, since you are most likely selling the item for less than retail, this illustrates to the customer the savings they will receive.
ThredUp
This is a great and pretty unknown source to sell your stylish used clothes. You have to login to use the site but once you have created an account just go to Sell and request a bag. They will mail you a big shipping bag that you can stuff all your clothes for sale into. From there just leave the bag for the mailman and they shipping is prepaid. They will notify you once they have gone through your bag and taken inventory of what they want to sell and the price they will give you for everything. You have the option to pay extra and send back the things they don’t want or you can just opt to donate the remaining items. They will cut you a check and your done, didn’t have to list a thing, didn’t have to leave the house. As someone who makes tons of trashbags of designer baby clothes and then just hands them off to whoever I know who has a kid the right age, this was a great resource.
Tips to Sell to ThredUp 
- They like designer names
- Quality and condition need to be good
- They probably have rules about the amount of clothes they will take so assume no more than 50% of what you put in there will be accepted.
- Anticipate that you will make 1/3 what you would if you sold everything individually but will spend 1/10 the amount of time.
- The process to get your money is a little complicated
Summary:
Stop letting all those clothes you will never wear again take up space in your closet. I know that the cocktail dress was so expensive and you promised yourself you would wear it again, but who are you kidding, you just don’t like it. With simple aps like these it’s too easy not to send your clothes off to a new home and rake in some money for, dare I say, more clothes!
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