Flickr by John Beagle

Spring can be a great time to help your favorite senior citizens begin to clear out clutter in their homes.  A yard sale can be a great way to get rid of the items that they are no longer using.  They may even make a little extra money along the way.

The Motley Fool, a website about stocks, investing, and personal finance points out that those looking to invest an extra $1,000 or so are often able to come up with the cash by selling items in their own homes.  According to the Motley Fool, “You’ll gain not only money, but also a less-cluttered home.”

The Motley Foot recommends selling items on eBay, Half.com, Amazon or by having a yard sale.  A 2005 article on their site provides readers with hints for having a successful garage sale.  Their yard sale hints come from their community members who are also veterans of yard sales.

When it came time for me to clean out my Mom’s house I used a variety of approaches to selling her items (e.g., two yard sales, eBay, the newspaper, Amazon, a consignment shop, etc.)

I do have a few suggestions for yard sales based on my limited experiences:

-       Schedule the sale in the spring once the weather begins to warm up but well before vacation season.  This way people will have the time to attend and will more than likely be in town.  I had mine at the end of April and the beginning of May. We had great turn outs.

-       Schedule the sale on a weekend when there aren’t many other sales scheduled in your area (e.g., you can check your local newspaper’s on/offline classifieds).

-       Organize your garage sale by departments (e.g., holiday items, sporting goods, kitchen items, clothing, etc).  It will make it easier for people to find specific items they might have stopped by to find.

-       If you don’t want people shopping early, put sawhorse barricades up across your driveway with a sign letting them know the time that you will be open and that there will be no “early bird” sales.

-       Make sure that everyone who will be helping you arrives prior to the start of the sale.  There is often a crowd at the start and then the number of customers typically dwindles as the day goes on.

-       Make sure you have plenty of change on hand.

-       Secure your profits as the day goes on (inside your home, if possible).

Flickr by Random McRandomhead

In an earlier post (“Fall Prevention” posted by lmcgowan on January 14, 2009), I provided readers with an overview of the many risk factors associated with falls in the elderly and a list of things they can do to prevent such falls.  As we learned in that post, clutter can be a real concern.  According to ReadersDigest.com, clutter “places hoarders and their families, especially the elderly, at high risk for injuring themselves in a fall.”  

The Reader’s Digest online article also stresses that  ”dust, mildew, mold and rodent droppings commonly found in extreme clutter can irritate allergies or lead to headaches or respiratory problems like asthma for hoarders and their families. In some cases, home maintenance suffers, so individuals may endure freezing winters without heat and sweltering summers with no air conditioning.”  There have even been extreme situations in which “hoarding endangers not only the residents but also neighbors and firefighters, who face greater risk of injury and death when battling clutter-fed flames.  It can become a financial threat to communities as well.  Making a hoarder’s home safe and habitable can be staggeringly expensive, and hoards can’t always pick up that tab.”

A recent article on Martha Stewart’s website explains that:

• - “1.4 million Americans suffer from chronic hoarding & clutter.”
• - “People burn 55 minutes a day looking for things.” and
• - “80 percent of what we own we never use.”

She provides her site visitors with some excellent ways to eliminate and handle clutter in their homes.