A creative way to find money for college tuition

As I was for many years, my friend Cheryl is a single mom. Cheryl’s daughter will be the first of her 3 daughters to go to college. This young lady wants to be an elementary school teacher because she loves children and wants to one day have something of her own and having those summers and vacations off with her own children in the future is very important to her. For starters, she will be attending a 2-year high school, since she doesn’t want to go into too much debt to get her degree. She sounds like a good head on her shoulder, don’t you think?

Passed the FAFSA, received the Pell Grant, and after all the scholarships were awarded and all the money was applied to room and board, books, computer, and tuition, there is still a shortfall. Finding the last $4,000 for her daughter’s freshman year of college has been a challenge for my friend, especially since she doesn’t want to take out any student loans. So, we started brainstorming how to quickly raise money for college tuition. That’s how we found it!

I remember many years ago when Cheryl’s grandparents passed away, she was left with many items to do with what she wanted. I also remembered that some of those items were old treasures, antiques, and collectibles. They’ve always stayed in boxes stored in the basement and we both agreed they’d probably never go upstairs to put them on display and the girls probably wouldn’t want them either. We got busy digging up those treasures, cleaning them up, and started taking pictures of everything. There were plenty of salt and pepper shakers, pristine antique kitchen items, a large collection of dolls, a couple of very old, heavy and ornate chess sets, vintage jewelry and clothing, as well as other curiosities. We even discovered a collection of vintage WWII stamps and memorabilia.

I came up with this idea of ​​selling things online because my husband recently told me that our sister-in-law had started selling off her brother’s hunting gear by putting it on and selling it on E-Bay. She, in one afternoon, made nearly $1500 by auctioning off her old, long-standing Ducks Unlimited items. Not bad I would say.

It was a really good day when those bids started coming in after we listed your grandparents’ antiques and collectibles on the auction site. What seemed almost impossible to raise $4000 in a month became possible. Cheryl knew that her grandmother and grandfather would have absolutely no problem selling these things for one of her great-granddaughters to continue her education.