This was a bit of a fluke and I admit that I still don’t know what I’m doing. I found a baseball card of mine from my younger days and did a serach on ebay out of curiousity. I found an auction for the same card that ended at around $800 (but this card was graded at BGS 9.5). On an impulse I ended up buying about 10 more of the same card that were ungraded from ebay. I had this idea that the card would only increase in value over time and that if I got them graded they would be worth more. I realised soon enough that it’s not that simple so now it’s 4 years later and I still have them lying around in protected card holders. The card is the 1994 Alex Rodriguez Upper Deck Electric Diamond (#24), it’s a rookie card or something.

I think the lesson here is to not go on a whim when you think you have a great idea to make money and to do all the proper research before doing anything.

If anyone knows anything about these cards please let me know.

I got the idea for selling Neopet’s toys from a McDonald’s The Dog promotion they were having. I noticed that the Husky version of “The Dog” was going for $11-30 on Ebay. I was trying to get a hold of one myself because I had collected all the other dogs. This was in 2004 and I was really into this online game called Neopet’s so when I found out that McDonald’s was going to be doing a Neopet’s happy meal promotion a few weeks later I was really excited to collect them.

I’m not sure why I suddenly decided to start a money making venture with them instead but I realised that if people were willing to pay $11-30 for the Husky The Dog toy then maybe they would be willing to do the same with the Neopet’s toys. There were about 200 different toys to make a full set and I started eating McDonald’s like crazy, everytime I saw one I would go in. After about 10 meals I decided I couldn’t eat a happy meal everytime so I would just ask if I could buy the toy and even asked to choose them myself.

Each toy cost me about $2 if I didn’t eat a meal and since there were just over 200 in a set the whole set cost me a little over $400 to collect. I managed to collect two whole sets and also had tons of extras which I sold individually on Ebay. The two sets sold for over $800 on ebay and the individual toys sold for anywhere from $5 to $30 (for the rarer ones).

I ended up netting about $400 plus in profit alone from these toys! I also managed to keep some of my favourite toys for myself but I didn’t eat McDonald’s for about a year after =). This was my first venture and I think it was pretty successful. What do you think?