Gary North

May 16, 2009

There are used items offered for sale that you might want to buy. In a recession, there are real bargains out there. You can get great deals on tools, exercise equipment, and stereo equipment.

You probably use Craigslist to find cheap used items. It's a handy tool. My wife found the house we rented when we moved out of Mississippi. My wife and I each found a used minivan earlier this year.

Craigslist is helping to bankrupt American newspapers. Sellers can run ads for free. Free is good.

For those sellers who have not caught on, the local newspaper still works. It works for buyers, too.

Your time is valuable. Craigslist searching takes a lot of time. You can speed up the process by using Google Toolbar or any toolbar that has a highlighting feature. Search for the key word or words that are deal-makers for you.

If your local newspaper has an "alert me" feature, use it. I bought a very good bottom-freezer refrigerator this way back in 2005. It cost $350. It's still in my house, which I rent out. It never had any problems.

I went to the classified ads section on appliances. I signed up to be alerted to "refrigerators." Within a week, I was sent an email that had the ad for the one I bought.

Any local newspaper that does not offer an "alert me" option for its classified ads is terminal.

From BillM:

For your readers that feel they want to use Craigslist in a specific locale, I have learned a bit of a 'shortcut.' Go to the drop down box for various items to the right of 'search for' just immediately to the right of 'in:' open the drop down and the third from the top is 'all for sale/wanted.' I then type in for example 'Toyota low mileage' and then hit search and that will pretty much give you every ad in that locale that has those words in the description. I have discovered that some phrases are not picked up if you don't have a space between words that posters may or may not have spaced or not spaced.

Another tip, many common words and I mean common let alone ....shall we say ....Hyundai are misspelled and you need to factor that in, so keep your search words very short and brief initially. Many posters put their items in the wrong category or buyers think they should be in a different category than the seller thought.

One other tip for finding deals on craigslist is I have made some of my best buys is contacting sellers 10 to 20 days from their last post for sale as reality seems to have set in with some sellers (a brand new 6000 BTU Frigidaire window air conditioner still in the cardboard box) for $55.00 and a very nice real leather notebook brief case for $20.00 that was less than a month old. Virtually all private craigslist sale are not subject to any sales tax as a nice little stipend also.

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