Welcome. If you're a subscriber of mine,
Then chances are you like electronic gadgets.
Things like smartphones, tablets, digital cameras, game consoles, etc.
So, in this episode, I'm going to show you some ways to
buy electronic gadgets for less money than what everybody else pays for them.
Now some of my viewers were probably go like: "Duh, that's just common sense,"
but I think this will be pretty useful to a lot of people.
So there are essentially three strategies that I'm going to cover, and you can't just depend on one single strategy.
I, actually, personally use a combination of these three.
Strategy A: Buying brand new gadgets.
Okay, the first part of the strategy is pretty simple.
Find the product we want to buy, find the best price for it. That might be online, that might be in a store,
and then just buy it. Now the key is once you buy the gadget, you need to follow these steps.
Step 1: Keep the original box and everything that comes inside,
and I mean everything. And
if there's, like, tape holding a box together,
then need to be careful when you remove that tape so that you don't rip the box.
Step two: You take care of the gadget.
Seriously, some people are really hard on their stuff.
Don't leave it in a hot car, or the heat orbit. Don't get it wet, don't get it scratched up.
Don't get it dented up. Um, if you can use, like, protective coverings
so that you can help prevent things from getting scratched up.
Step 3. OK.
So, when the next new gadget comes out, you can sell your old one to help subsidize the price of the new one.
And if you follow the steps one and two properly, you should be able to put everything back in the box.
So now you'll have a product that's essentially like new in the original box and packaging.
This should fetch a premium on the used market compared to what other people have.
Now you could sell it on eBay,
but honestly if you want the most money for it,
I'm going to suggest not doing that and here's why.
If your item sells for a $100 on eBay,
you're going to spend probably $15 on packaging and shipping.
$9 on eBay fees, and $3 on Paypal fees leaving you with a grand total of $73.
And there's still a small risk that the customer may complain that the item is not as described and want to return it.
With Craigslist you don't have that problem.
You basically meet someone in person, hand them the product, they hand you $100,
transaction's over, goodbye, so,
Craigslist is probably the best place to sell this type of used equipment.
Okay, now let's talk about Strategy B.
Let's see if we can chart out the value of electronic gadgets.
Let's say that on the left is the value of the gadget with 100% being the cost to buy it new at the
store, and on the bottom will represent the age of the gadget.
So this curve more or less represents the depreciation of that gadget over time.
Now this curve here is going to be different for different gadgets, but it's actually a pretty typical representation.
So you can essentially break down the lifespan of the gadget into several different age ranges.
Now you can see that the older the gadget is, the less money
it's going to cost you, and the less money you'll lose on it
should you decide to sell it.
So if you're willing to live with the product that's maybe a year or two old, or perhaps a generation behind,
You can save a lot of money. Let me show you how this works.
Most recently
I was shopping at a retail store for a new camera. I
saw the Samsung Galaxy camera, and really liked it, but it was $450.
I went online and researched it, and I found out that the camera in the store was actually
the second generation product.
So I compare the differences between the first and second generation,
and found there was almost no difference in features.
So I started shopping on eBay, and found a first generation model for sale and bought it for $185.
And you know what? I'm
perfectly happy with my purchase.
This does exactly everything that I wanted it to do, and I don't think that the newer version would have been any
particularly better for me. Now
I've already been using this product for three months,
and I could probably turn around today and sell this product and get all the money back out of it that I put into it.
Now you certainly can't make that claim for a brand new product
Okay, now let's talk about Strategy C.
Strategy C is definitely not for everyone. If you look at this life span chart again,
you'll see that you can buy really old gadgets for almost nothing.
Some gadgets at this stage of life are virtually useless.
Okay, so take this old Aiptek camcorder.
Now, this thing is really old and I bought this almost 10 years ago.
This was one of the first camcorders that actually recorded directly to an SD card.
Now the truth is today this thing is completely worthless,
and you could buy a much better camcorder for $20, $30.
So this is an example of the type of thing
I'm not talking about.
Just because it's old and cheap does not necessarily mean it's useful in any way whatsoever.
So this is not what I'm talking about. However,
what about this old Nintendo Gameboy?
I only paid $25 for this, and
the games are ridiculously cheap. Many of these I bought on eBay for three or four dollars apiece.
And you know what? Some of these games are still fun.
I can play Tetris all day long, and actually enjoy it more than trying to play Tetris on my iPhone,
since my iPhone still has no tactile controls.
So another example of Strategy C would be like these old Apple iBooks.
For example, this G4 model can be bought on eBay for between $50 to $70. Now as long as you're not
deluded into thinking this is going to do everything a modern computer could do,
there's actually a lot of fun stuff you can do on one of these.
So I hope you enjoyed my video.
This is kind of just a little side project I've been working on.
I actually have a much bigger project that I'm about to reveal to you in a week or two that
I think you're going to find pretty interesting so stick around. I'll see you next time.
{Edited by BusySteam5}
[Thanks for watching The iBook Guy]