30/01/2012

Transform your finances by clearing out old CDs

With all the fun and frolics of the Christmas party season behind us January offers an opportunity to reflect on our lives, plan for the future and make a few changes where necessary. With all that present buying, food shopping and festive rounds down the pub, your wallet may feeling considerably lighter. January is a terrific time to de-clutter your life, and you may be able to grab cash for unwanted belongings as you go about it.

In this digital age, music can be streamed from the Internet and your entire music collection can reside on your iPod. That huge stack of CDs can start to feel like it is taking over your living room. The same can be said for your DVD collection. Whilst it is great to own a physical copy of the movies that you love, there are many ways to do this in our new digital age. Trimming down to just those which you cannot bear to part with will tidy up your living space, and you certainly will be thanking yourself the next time you have to move house.

The Internet presents a range of options for ridding yourself of unwanted games, CDs and DVDs. Websites such as Amazon and Ebay allow individuals to sell CDs via their website. The process for listing items is streamlined and efficient, as all you need is the barcode associated with your item. There's rarely a need to provide your own description, as most items will have been previously listed, and you can usually have something up for sale on the site in a matter of minutes.

Competition is fierce, with many companies selling CDs for pennies, and making their profits from the standard postal charges the sites insist all customers pay. Such companies are making their profits in bulk sales and thus have reduced costs for packaging. Having to package and post each sale personally is a time-consuming task making this an extremely difficult way indeed to make your fortune.

Some brilliant websites have sprung up to address this gap in the market, purchasing your unwanted items directly from you, with the minimum of hassle, offering free postage or even insured courier pick up delivery of large sales. Most will provide an instant quote for items, often only requiring the input of the bar code to give you a price. Recent innovations include allowing users to enlist their webcams as bar code readers to facilitate rapid inputting of product details.

Not only is this a great way to make some extra cash, it is also an environmentally friendly. Ridding yourself of old CDs is normally something of a challenge, there is no particular bin for them at the local tip, so inevitably they get stuck in with your general rubbish and are destined for a landfill. Such a shame as CD's are eminently recyclable and can be made into goods such as coat hangers or car headlamps. What a lovely way to make some space in your home and earn a little of extra cash.

bookmark this story with::

OTHER NEWS