GRANNIES NEED EXTRA MONEY TOO!

I recently had a conversation with an old school chum and she was broadly hinting that times are kinda tough right now and how she could use some extra cash. This topic digresses from senior dating but is important to a lot of seniors in this down economy we are all experiencing. This is a quick method I use myself whenever I want some extra cash for a special purpose, like a cruise!

Everybody has too many books lying all over the house that they will probably never read! You can easily turn those books into some extra money by selling them on Half.com. Half.com is part of eBay but charges no fees for listing on their service until you sell your items. It is not only for books but for DVDs, CDs, audiotapes & electronic game modules etc. Check it out and then follow this plan:

l. Take every book you have in your house that you don’t want to keep for some special reason and all those you know you will never ever read again and list them on Half.com.

2. Beg, borrow or steal every book you can from relatives and friends, tell them you are starting a new charity (yourself).

3. Check out garage sales, you can usually buy books for 50-cents or $1 and sometimes can get a whole box of books for a couple of bucks! Almost any book on Elvis will bring big $$, I recently bought one at a garage sale for $1 and got $36 for it!

4. Estate sales usually have trouble getting rid of all the books. At the end of the sale — buy ‘em all for one low price and list them on Half.com.

5. Thrift stores sell books rather inexpensively, go on senior citizen discount day and get them for less. Large churches sometimes hold special book sales or even church rummage sales are a good target for really cheap books.

6. Call your local library they may have perodic sales of discarded titles, in my hometown they hold a sale 1st a month at a warehouse location but also have racks of discarded books at each library that are pretty cheap. Discarded books do get “marked” as such which makes them less valuable on Half-com but you can get some very interesting titles which will still sell.

You will soon figure out which books can make you some money and which can’t. Fiction & novels do not sell well (there are just too many copies of them), non-fiction sells the best…self-help, animal books, how-to-books, text-books, even children’s books sell well. One of the little-known secrets of Half.com that they won’t tell you about is that you can actually make some money on the postage even if you sell a book for 75 cents which is the minimum price. The postage is a set amount and is always Media Mail which you can print the labels for on your computer thru PayPay (in case you haven’t done that before). PayPal gives you a tiny break on the postage price (they cut a deal with the USPS due to large volume). Avoid selling really really heavy books as it will eat you up on postage, but on most you can make an extra 50 cents to $1 or so over and above the selling price of the book.

Half.com is for newer books, not antiques books, those will sell better on eBay. You don’t have to take pictures or write descriptions like you do when selling at eBay as they use the ISBN# and auto-generate all that information for you in the listing. Do pay attention to the “condition” part of the listings, they are pretty strict about that, if in doubt, just go one category below what you think it might be. They even give “suggested” selling prices but you do not have to follow their “suggestions”, check out what the others are selling for and just be reasonable, usually the lowest price book gets sold 1st, so keep that in mind if there are a lot of books like yours listed. There is a bit of work to Half.com but once you get going it is a lot easier than selling on eBay, you don’t have to concentrate very much while you are listing and can even watch TV at the same time.

Now that USPS actually picks up packages at your mailbox, it is a breeze to do the shipping. I put small & medium size books in a large-size envelope that I buy in bulk at Sam’s Club, add a piece of cardboard for stiffening if the book is flimsy or wrap the books in a heavy brown paper, boxes are too expensive and not really necessary. You can usually get by with not spending more than 10 cents per book to mail.

The biggest problem in the beginning is that Half.com only pays twice a month (they will direct-deposit to your bank account) and you have to pay for the postage up front, so there is a little outlay of expense there. But, Half.com gives you 5 business days to ship so you won’t be out too much for too long.

I recently rounded up a bunch of books I had lying around my house & sold almost $300 in one month, so I know it is possible. You can also do almost the same thing with Amazon and several other used book sites on the Internet. I have not had any personal experience with those but feel free to check “em out. The book market is fairly saturated and competitive so I doubt if there is much difference in the selling fees they pay out.

If you are in need of some quick Granny Cash jump on over to Half.com and check it out!

admin@DateGranny.com

Underground Dating on CLASSMATES.COM

A underground method for senior online dating can be found on Classmates.com.  Just check out the years you went to high school and renew old friendships, you might just find your new love among your former loves or sometimes the one you remembered as the geekiest one is now a stud!

Classmates.com does not really represent themselves as an online dating site, but there are plenty of opportunities to match up and connect with people from your past.  After all, these are all people you already have a common bond with shared memories (good & bad) and immediate subjects of conversation.  It can be much easier to strike up a friendship or even a romance this way than with a perfect stranger.  Classmates.com does charge for a membership, but then so do most of the dating services, just think of it as a new weapon in your online dating arsenal.

Most high school & college alumni now have reunions at least every 5 years, some are more often.  Classmates.com is the perfect place to find out if and when your class might be holding a reunion.  Reunions are a MUST DO on your senior dating list, lots of old romances have been rekindled at a high school reunion many years later.  I recently met a couple who married after meeting at their 50th high school reunion.  They hadn’t even really known each other in HS.  She was widowed and lived in Iowa, he was divorced and lived in Las Vegas, they remarried after about a year and now spend winters in Vegas & summers in much cooler Iowa, what a way to go!

My own HS holds a reunion every 5 years and I would not miss it!  We were a rather large class and still have almost 200 in attendance.  I have been to every one since my 15th reunion and it is great fun to keep up with old friends, many are now on my email list.  At the last reunion I did spy one of my old beaus and we shared a dance after dinner, unfortunately (for me anyway) he seems very happily married….DARN IT!

admin @DateGranny.com

AARP – A War over Health Care!

“The American Association of Retired Persons finds itself in a bind. CBS News says thousands of angry geezers are quitting the AARP over the Obama healthcare plan — even though the AARP has not officially endorsed the plan. “I feel they’re supporting it through the backdoor,” says one former member.

Defectors are said to be joining the American Seniors Association, which “calls itself the conservative alternative,” says CBS. (The ASA’s web site features the Capitol Building — which we didn’t consider heretofore a big draw for the elderly; a feller could get heat stroke waiting for security to let him in — and invites patriotic oldsters to “mail your TORN AARP card” to them for… a new ASA membership. What, no assault rifle?)

Rightbloggers do their bit and try and speak senior:

Obama’s treason has “reminded Americans why they dumped the Democrats during the Clinton escapades,” says AJ Strata, invoking the last Presidency during which the protesters could drive a car. Don Surber shakes a liver-spotted fist at the AARP for saying* the 60,000 defectors are “just a drop in the bucket” compared to their membership of 40 million: “I’ll tell you,” Surber warbles, “I didn’t make it 55 years just to be somebody’s drop in the bucket,” and removes the five-dollar bill he was going to put in AARP’s birthday card. (*Actually CBS says AARP said this, but despite the old folks’ hatred of the liberal media, there’s something about CBS that makes them credulous. Morley Safer, maybe.)

Maybe there’s more to this than the rightwing talking points indicate. It may have something to do with an influx of hippies and punks into the senior community.

Being quite wrinkly ourselves, we perceive that we are part of the neo-geezer target AARP is trying to reach with its recent “Over Aged Earth Loving Hippies” stories and Buzzcocks songs in their commercials. Since Dennis Hopper started telling new retirees, “Your generation is definitely not headed for Bingo Night,” the geezer pitch seems to have taken a turn for the modish and hippie-ish — even (to put it in terms you whippersnappers may understand) the hipster-ish .

Maybe this is what’s really turning off the AARP defectors. We are getting reports that the Republicans have been circulating the AARP Magazine issue with Springsteen on the cover (“The Boss Turns 60… He’s our blue-collar conscience, our rock ‘n’ roll sage”) to old-school geezers, and telling the old folks that Obama and this treasonous Chicago-style “Boss” want to play loud music in seniors centers to make them bleed to death from the ears so there’ll be more room for hippie orgies. When you reach a certain stage in life, this may be a compelling argument.

Even within the geriatric community, it seems, the young frighten the old. Where other analysts see a political war, we see seniors of a certain tenure withdrawing in horror as the barbarians with long, thinning hair arrive to fill their convalescent homes with the smell of reefer and patchouli.”

As published in the Village Voice, NY