sand dollars

The first week of me doing the 52 week make money challenge wasn’t at all what I anticipated. I thought it would be rather routine with me selling some stuff I wanted to get rid of, but that changed with an invitation to go to the beach.

I was invited by a friend to go to search for sea glass. I don’t actually collect it, but my friend does, and I’ll never turn down a day at the beach. I had an ulterior motive as well. There is an avid base of collectors who covet rare pieces, and sea glass can be used in jewelry as well. That means that if I happened to get lucky and find a top quality piece, it could be worth $50 – $100.

Now, this isn’t simply walking along the beach looking for sea glass that happens to wash ashore. This is pretty hardcore searching. Most people who do this don wet suits and spend the day digging in the gravel and sand (sea glass tends to accumulate in gravel) out where the waves break. They create their own special tools to scoop out the gravel and search for the glass. Here’s a photo of me going at it to give you a feel for what I’m talking about:

While we did find some rare colors, most of the pieces were pretty small and I gifted all those that I found to my friend. The result was that no money was made in this instance. I do believe there may be an opportunity to make some money this way at a later date, especially if a few good winter storms come through (this churns things up and is usually good for hunting sea glass).

What we did find while out on the beach were a lot of whole sand dollars:

I thought that these might have some value, so I collected ones I could find, and ended up gathering about 90. Of course they were still wet, so I had to lay them out to dry.

Once dry, my dilemma was how to try to sell them. I didn’t want to try eBay because of how fragile they are, (a number of them broke during transport and while moving them around when drying) and I didn’t want to take the risk sending them anywhere by mail. I ended up contacting a number of my artist friends to see if any of them were interested in the sand dollars. I ended up selling the best 50 from the lot for $10, or $0.20 a piece, to one of them. I don’t need to send them through the mail as I will simply deliver them to him the next time I’m in his area.

I probably sold them for less than I could have gotten if I’d tried a little harder. The main purpose this time was just to see if I could sell them. I will certainly be keeping my eyes open for more sand dollars on future trips to the beach now that I know that there is a market for them, and I can make some extra money picking them up.

It also was a good lesson in taking advantage of opportunities as they come. Selling sand dollars was never a plan or anything I even considered before. I could have very easily seen the sand dollars and left them (or picked up just a few). Anyone could have gathered them, but I was the only one on the beach who decided to do so. Simply deciding to see if there was a money-making opportunity by gathering them allowed me to earn an extra $10. Part of being able to earn extra money is recognizing opportunities that might allow you to do so.

Week 1 Total: $10.00

Goals for Week 2

I started to go through stuff that I have, but no longer use or need, and I have a lot more than I thought I did. It’s a bit overwhelming, but at least I dragged some of the boxes out of the garage and began to go through them. I didn’t put anything up for sale this first week, but I have started to go through and sort the items in them. The big goal will be to get more of the stuff sorted and begin to put some of it up for sale. If I can get this area organized enough to sell one to five items a week, I should do quite well going forward.