Summer Job Reselling Silver Brings in $10,000

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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The first week of my new course, Idea to Income has been a lot of fun. I have been enjoying sending the messages to people's phones, getting responses back, and hopefully helping a lot of listeners come up with a good idea, not just a good idea, I should say, a profitable idea for their first or next Side Hustle. If you haven't joined in yet, go check it out at courses.sidehustleschool.com. This is a daily series of messages that will come straight to your phone. Usually comes at 9 a.m. local time.

So whatever time zone you're in, anywhere in the world, it will come at 9 a.m. And for a limited time, you can use discount code IDEA to get 20% off. So that's courses.sidehustleschool.com. And now for today's story, when his roommate makes $2,000 buying and selling silver in one weekend, this college student turns off the TV and starts his own education in precious metals. He goes on to earn $10,000 his first summer.

This is a story of reselling with a specific market in practice. So lots to learn here. And as always, I want it to be helpful for you. Story is called Summer Job Reselling Silver, brings in $10,000. That story is coming up in just 30 seconds.

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Max Hockley vividly remembers the most important Sunday of his entire college experience. It was supposed to be an uneventful evening watching TV. That is, until his roommate burst into the room and threw a stack of $100 bills on the table. When Max asked him where he got all this money, the roommate exclaimed, "Silver, baby!" A friend had told him that gold and silver were at all-time highs and that he made a tidy profit heading to garage sales, buying mismatched jewelry and then selling it for scrap. In fact, Max's friend had made $2,000 in profit that weekend.

Now, Max was a broke college student who needed the money. So upon hearing about his friend's success, he immediately begged for lessons. He also studied up on his own. After going through countless YouTube videos and talking to a few old timers at the local library's coin club, Max charted a course of attack. He would spend Thursday nights flipping through Craigslist to find weekend garage sales and mapping the best possible route to visit each place.

Then over the weekend, he would drive around to the sales, typically hitting up around 50 of them. That's right, 50 garage sales. And on Monday, Max would then go to his dealer, whom he had met through networking, and sell the items for a profit. Then he would repeat the process the following week. Starting with just $500, Max went on to make over $10,000 in profit that summer.

But it wasn't always easy. Hitting up all those garage sales taught him that competition was intense and that he needed to hustle harder than anyone else if he wanted to do well. In fact, one of his most common experiences was showing up to a sale and finding out that someone else had bought the items he was looking for just hours earlier. Speed was of the essence, and Max quickly learned that it was more fruitful for him to just move on to the next sale instead of focusing on his disappointment. Because he had done so well in his first summer, he printed up business cards that showed the different things he bought, which included coins, jewelry, diamonds, gold, and silver.

This helped the next summer when he went about his intense routine once again. Even as Max continued to earn a good profit, he never stopped learning more about his craft. For example, he learned how to ensure that the metals he bought were authentic and how to calculate their value based on weight and purity. As his side hustle started taking off, he also invested in mitigating the three principal risks that precious metal owners face. Those would be theft, drops in the price of materials, and fakes.

The risk mitigation plan included purchasing a safe deposit box for his higher value items, as well as buying equipment he could use to test authenticity. While he couldn't control the fluctuations in the price of silver, which has dipped as low as $12 and gone as high as $48 throughout his time in the business, Max makes sure that he liquidates his inventory often so he doesn't get burned by the volatility. Looking back, Max says that the willingness to hustle was what set him apart. Not many people are willing to get up at 6 a.m. on a weekend and drive from house to house over and over.

His commitment to the craft has also left him with wild stories that he could never forget. One such experience was meeting a former nun at a garage sale who was selling some jewelry for just the price of $20. Max was honest with her. He told her that what she owned was worth at least $500, but she said she didn't care because she was a communist. In the end, the goods changed hands for $40, which was all that Max had left in his pocket after making a bunch of other purchases.

But it seems like a pretty good $40 buy. In modern times, Max has followed true side hustle school fashion and shifted his focus over to sharing his knowledge. Although he now runs a car rental company for his day job, he remains passionate about the scrap business and spends his spare time making videos on YouTube to teach people the tricks of the trade. His channel, The Silver Picker, now has over 100,000 subscribers. As they say, one man's trash is another man's treasure.

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Thank you so much for tuning in today. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. This story offers some important reselling lessons with a bit of a twist. And a twist is that Max is dealing with an item that has a lot of price volatility. And so even though he wants to quickly liquidate his inventory to mitigate that risk, you know, the risk of the price going down, the nature of volatility is that the price could also go up.

So some interesting opportunities there. Some people might have more of a strategy of trying to acquire items, you know, when the price is relatively low, holding onto them for a while, and then selling them, you know, when the price goes up. But of course that involves a holding cost and also some risk that Max was trying to avoid. Anyway, good lessons there. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/1660.

Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you'll subscribe or follow. Come back tomorrow for episode 1661. All right, that's all for today. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

from the Onward Project.