After the holidays most homes are overflowing with piles of
presents. But as you go to stow them, you run into gifts from holidays
past: clothes that haven't left their hangers in years, the clunky
camera replaced by a credit-card-thin digital, the stroller that your
kindergartner now shuns. Time to make room for the new by cashing in on
the old.

A yard sale can't happen until spring, but it also might not be worth
the hassle, says Peter Walsh, organizational consultant for The
Learning Channel's Clean Sweep.
"People turn up at yard sales with pockets of change, expecting to pay
pennies on the dollar." Plus, who has time to organize and advertise
it? Instead, the twenty-first-century way to unclutter your closets is
a click away—on eBay. We're talking about an online garage sale, which
not only takes less time (about three hours) but also delivers more
money. In an experiment Walsh conducted, two Chicago families sold
possessions of roughly equal value—one at a traditional garage sale,
the other at an online sale. When the tallies came in, the family
selling their possessions online netted nearly seven times what the
garage-sale family did.

All you need to do is gather your saleable goods and hire a trading
assistant (TA) who will take photos of the items, write the ad and
schlep everything to the post office—all for a cut of the profits.
"It's a way to get fair market value with really no work," says Brad
Porteus, eBay's director of marketplace programs, who notes that most
TAs charge a third of the total for their commission. Selling with the
help of a TA is now a common practice, and eBay provides a means for
sellers both to find and evaluate TAs: Go to www.ebay.com/ta and type
in your ZIP code to get locations and eBay ratings for TAs in your
area. The 16,000 U.S. TAs listed on the site operate independently of
the company, so be sure to look at the profile and feedback score for
any TA you're considering.

In addition to doing the grunt work, TAs offer expertise on everything from creating a title that will
make your item pop up in the right searches to taking a photo that will
attract attention. They can also advise you on which items will garner
the biggest payday—usually electronics, sporting equipment, musical
instruments and designer clothes. Of course, good ol' garage sales will
always have a place, especially as a way to unload less valuable
clutter like toys, paperback books and CDs. Plus, they're fun. "Yard
sales are becoming more of a social event than a way to make money,"
says Walsh. "And that's fine—anything to get that stuff out of the
house."