How to Best Give Away Your Stuff
Learn the best places for donating your stuff and find out how to create an effective system to make it easy to do the giving.
Sometimes an important part of getting stuff done is getting stuff out! Erin wrote in, asking: “How do I get stuff out of the house to people who need it?”
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How to Best Give Away Your Stuff
Of course, the easy answer is by using a shovel, but that just gets stuff out onto your lawn, not necessarily to the people who need it. After all, if you’re throwing away old clothes and the people camping on your lawn actually need a gas generator and some spare reading material, it’s a real mismatch.
Where Should You Donate Your Stuff?
First, spend a half hour researching the different places where you can give your stuff. Many non-profits would love to have your stuff, and different stuff may go to different places. You want to find places to give clothes and appliances, like thrift stores, Goodwill, or the Salvation Army. Extra books can go to libraries, schools, or to organizations like GotBooks.com.
Consider organizations that provide for children in need, local non-profits, and religious institutions as places to donate old computers, printers, and other office equipment that still works.
If you’re getting rid of a car and want to donate it to a good cause, there are several services that will pick up a donated car. Some will pay you for the car; others will donate the proceeds to a local non-profit. My personal favorite is the CarTalk vehicle donation program that benefits public ratio.
How to Give So Others Will Benefit
If you want your donations to go directly into the hands of people who will benefit, you want to consider the different giving models that are out there. It’s amazing how many institutions exist to help you get rid of your stuff.
You can give stuff directly to people who want it by visiting FreeCycle.org. At Freecycle, you can find a mailing list for your area. When you have something to get rid of, mail a notice to the list. If someone out there wants it, they’ll usually be willing to pick it up, often within hours of posting the listing.
How to Find Out What People Need
Some non-profits give donations directly to people who need them. I worked for a day in a medical clinic serving the homeless and learned much to my surprise that the #1 thing homeless people need—even before blankets and clothes—is socks. If you donate clean, new socks to the clinic, they’ll give them directly to the people who need them.
Some places sell your stuff to people who don’t need it, and then give part of the money they make to the people who do need it. Rather than giving a homeless person your Hello Kitty socks, you can give the socks to the Philadelphia AIDS Thrift, a socially conscious thrift store. They’ll sell your Hello Kitty socks to an overly stylish middle-class Barbra Streisand fan for enough money to buy a dozen pairs of socks for someone with AIDS. If what you’re getting rid of has a high-enough market value, you’ll do the most good by giving it to a store that will turn it into money and then use the money for good causes.
If you give your stuff to a non-profit, you can often deduct the value of the stuff from your taxes. But if you just want stuff gone, you have even more options.
How to Make Money Off Your Stuff
If you want to make some money off your old stuff, you can auction it off on eBay. Once, long ago, auctions involved fine art and family heirlooms. Thanks to eBay, even I can have the thrill of getting a bunch of strangers competing for my old camping tent with the broken zipper and missing stakes. If that isn’t a rush, I don’t know what is.
You can also straight-up sell your stuff on Craigslist, which has online classified ads. With eBay or Craigslist, however, you have to pack it up and ship it. That means more work. When I want it gone, I want it gone, now. Besides, did you see Toy Story 3? I could never pack up my old G.I. Joes, Barbies, Pokeman, Power Rangers, Transformers, and Cabbage Patch dolls, knowing they’re really alive and would take it personally.
Create a System to Give Stuff Away
If you get rid of your stuff as a one-time deal, more stuff will start accumulating the moment you’re done. Stuff is like that. Create a system for giving stuff away. Erika Salloux of Living Harmony suggests creating a “Giving Box.” It’s a container that lives out of the way.Â
Put three pieces of paper inside your giving box,. The first is a list of the donation centers you identified earlier. The second has two columns. One column is headed “Item” and the other “Value.” The third piece of paper is Goodwill’s “Donated Items Value Guide” (there’s a link in this episode’s transcript). It will tell you how much stuff is worth.
When you want to get rid of something, just put it in the container. Jot down the item and its value on your piece of paper. You can use the Goodwill estimated value even if you’re bringing your item somewhere else. If your item isn’t in the guide, estimate what it would go for on eBay or Craigslist.
When the container fills up, take a quick glance at what’s in there and identify the donation centers you’ll be visiting. Then toss the container in your car and drop the stuff off at the donation centers nearest you. If you’re in it for the money, pick up a contributed goods receipt. Don’t fill out the receipt while you’re out, however. When you get home, record the items and their values you listed onto the receipt, recycle the paper you’d listed the items on, and put a new sheet of paper into your Giving Box. And, of course, file the receipt for your taxes this year.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
RESOURCES
SteverRobbins – Resource page with a collection of donation links, online auction sites, etc.
Cluttered Room image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.Â
