Vroom! Hold a garage sale for profit and fun

Q: I'm thinking about having a garage sale. Do you have any pointers on making the most for my efforts?

A: Entire books have been written on how to make the most money from a garage sale. But the body of advice seems to boil down to a few pracatical tips:

Start with a plan. Pick a date at least a few weeks out. Weekends are best — Saturdays first, Fridays second, Sundays third. Steer clear of weekdays, holiday weeks and weekends close to April 15, when people are worrying about paying their taxes. Start your sale in the early morning, as that's when the most serious buyers will show up.

Go through your house and decide what goes. A good rule of thumb: If you haven't used or worn a particular item in two years, you can live without it. But don't throw anything away. Even if you think something is junk, someone else collects it.

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Treat your sale like a business. Organize the merchandise, putting like items with like items, so buyers can find what they're looking for. If you're selling clothing, put it on a rack or string up a clothesline and hang your pieces for people to see.

Advertise. Run ads in local papers and on the Internet (there are lots of free yard-and-garage-sale sites) and put up flyers. Be specific about what sort of merchandise you have: clothing, antiques, whatever. You'll get the people who really want that stuff.

Jean Chatzky’s Bottom Line
This week: Locking in a mortgage rate
When you apply for a mortgage, you'll need to decide if you want to lock in your interest rate. To do that, you'll have to pay a quarter point or so, an amount that is typically refunded at closing. When to lock is a crucial question. Trying to time the bottom of the market for interest rates, just like trying to time the stock market, is a fool's game. And it's really easy to get burned in a rising rate environment — rates have been moving up recently from record lows. Here are four questions you can use to help you decide when to pull the trigger:

Can you afford to lose? If a jump in rates of a quarter point means you'll no longer be able to afford your house, lock immediately.

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What's your rate now? In a refinance situation, if you have an 8-percent or 9-percent rate, you win whether rates fall to 7 percent or 7.25 percent. If you're already at 7.75 percent, that quarter point makes a bigger difference.

How is the bond market doing? Mortgages follow bonds closely — not in lockstep, but closely. In most cases, one bad day won't cause a huge jump in mortgage rates, but if a bad pattern starts emerging (if you hear the CNBC jockeys talking about sell-offs over two or three consecutive days, for example), then act fast. Rates almost always rise more quickly than they fall.

Are you being greedy? If rates have plummeted to 30-year lows and you're holding out for 31-year lows, you're asking for too much.

When you do lock in a rate, get all rates clearly specificied in writing, and make sure to give yourself enough days to get to the closing table.

Jean Chatzky is the financial editor for “Today,” editor-at-large at “Money” magazine and the author of “Talking Money: Everything You Need to Know About Your Finances and Your Future.” Her latest book, "Pay It Down: From Debt to Wealth on $10 a Day," will be released in September. Copyright ©2004. For more information, go to her Web site, www.JeanChatzky.com.

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