My own interests are wildly varied and numerous, therefore managing time is the most important thing right now.
In trying to create a schedule, I first imagine what I would like to do each day if there were 100 hours in the day. Or 1000 hours in a week. This is just an exercise in prioritizing the activities and goals. Then I create a weekly calendar where I can decide what to do with the more limited 16 hours a day, for each of the 7 days in the week.
For myself, three hours of this priority is easy.
I have an eBay business that has made about $80,000 so far. But not, unfortunately, every year. It’s $80,000 for the last 10 years. I have two different accounts. This allows me 100 free listings on one and 500 on another. Also one is a basic starter store at about 7 a month and the other is tied to a medium sized store, for which I pay 27 a month. Then, of course, I have to give about 12 percent of what I make to eBay, and another 4 percent to PayPal. Plus other fees for certain kinds of listings I might need to add to the promotions. And I also need to pay more for shipping than I charge or else the prices will be too high. And then there are the returns. People buy a magazine, take out the pages they want, and then claim that it never contained those pages. Or else the Postal Service mangles an envelope. I end up keeping about 75 percent of what I make.
The goal while working was to just keep it going, and take advantage of free listing promotions. I was never ready to take full advantage of them. Now that I’m retired I can easily make about 2,000 a month, or 24,000 a year by working about 3 hours a day. It’s not taxed, so far, so this is about the same as making 36,000 a year, after tax.
It’s almost all from a second-hand magazine store in NYC that went out of business and auctioned off its inventory. I bought about one-fourth of their inventory for about $3,000. And about one-fourth of that is sold. That’s where the $80,000 came from. The other three-fourths will likely be worth about $240,000, and will begin getting harder and harder to sell. I have never even tried selling some of the titles, like Time and Life and Look and thousands of Sports Illustrated. I only expect about $120,000 to sell before I end up giving away all the other items. Or, more likely, throwing them away.
But 3 hours a day for at least 3 or more of the days of every week works out well. I’ll have about 6 more years of $20,000 extra income if I keep it up, and only close for vacations and travel.
I should mention that I have also picked up a lot of nice books at second hand stores and library sales. I put these on Amazon. The Amazon store worked well for a while, adding another $300 or so its best months. But it is not worth the effort continually reducing the price of your books as other persons with the same book will beat your price by one penny just so it gets listed in front of yours. I had about 1,000 books on at once and only sold about 20 books a month on average during the best months. I ignored books that only sold for $5 or less, and just gave them to Goodwill and Salvation Army. I am cancelling all books on Amazon soon so that I can concentrate on eBay.
Should mention too that in order to keep all these books and magazines around, it created a lack of space in the garage, basement, attic, office, and other rooms in the house. So, just last year, we rented a large storage space that is air-conditioned for temperature and humidity. This is about $200 a month. In months where I would make $2,000, it’s another 10 percent gone. Overall, it means that I actually keep closer to 70 percent of revenue on good months, and as low as 55 percent on bad months. So this makes it necessary to make every month a good month.
Still 10 hours a week max will do it, or 40 a month. And, in a $2,000 month, that’s as much as $50 an hour, gross, or $30 an hour, net. And $30 untaxed is like making $50. (Taxing “hobbies” like eBay works well if you keep the profits to around $20,000 a year. The law allows for this. eBay collects sales tax for you and hands that taxed money over to the state. So far, this has kept most U.S. states happy.)