If you're cleaning out a garage, a basement, or a parent's house, you're about to make a bunch of small decisions that add up to real money. Sell it, donate it, toss it, or hang onto it. Most people get these decisions wrong in one of two directions. Either they overvalue the stuff because of what they paid for it twenty years ago and what it feels like it should be worth, or they dump a whole table of it at a garage sale for pennies because they just want it gone. Both end up costing you.
Figuring out what something is worth takes about 15 minutes per item, and the method is the same whether it's a used bike, an old guitar, your dad's record collection, or a box of video games from the attic.
Prices of SOLD items are more reliable than active listing prices.
The single biggest mistake people make is searching eBay or Facebook Marketplace, seeing the same item listed for $400, and assuming theirs is worth $400. It isn't. That's the asking price. Anyone can ask anything. What matters is what people actually paid.
On eBay, run your search, then on the left side filter for Sold Items. That shows you the completed sales — real money that changed hands for the exact thing you're holding. Scroll through a page or two and you'll see a range. That range is your reality. If the asking prices are $400 and the sold prices cluster around $120, your item is worth $120, not $400.
Facebook Marketplace is a little harder because it doesn't have a clean sold filter, but you can get close by searching the item and filtering for listings marked sold, or by watching an item over a couple weeks and seeing what disappears versus what sits forever at an inflated price. If something has been listed for three months at $300, that's not what it's worth — that's what somebody wishes it was worth.
When to use the specialist sites
eBay sold listings work for almost everything, but a few categories have their own price databases that are faster and more accurate.
- Video games and consoles: PriceCharting tracks loose, complete-in-box, and sealed prices for pretty much every game ever made. Enter the title, see the going rate.
- Antiques and collectibles: Worthpoint has a huge archive of sold auction results across tens of millions of items. It's a paid subscription but you can usually get what you need from a free trial.
- Books: search the ISBN on AbeBooks or BookFinder and sort by price to see what copies in similar condition are selling for.
- Trading cards, coins, and stamps: these have specialty price guides and graded-sale databases that'll tell you a lot more than a general eBay search.
For tools, bikes, musical instruments, furniture, and general household stuff, eBay sold listings plus a Marketplace scan is enough.
When to get a real appraisal
Most of what's in a garage is not worth paying an appraiser for. But a few things are, and it's worth knowing the difference.
Get an appraisal when the item is potentially valuable enough that being off by 50% is a lot of money — think jewelry with real stones, firearms, fine art, antique furniture, or an instrument that might be a serious vintage piece and not just an old guitar. If 15 minutes of sold-listing research suggests something might be worth four figures or more, and you can't nail down the exact model, condition, or provenance on your own, that's when an appraiser earns their fee. For everything else, your 15 minutes of research is more accurate than most appraisers' gut, because you're looking at what the market did last month instead of what somebody remembers from a show in 2015.
How to know your item is worth much more than you're asking for
Watch out for the guy who shows up at the estate sale, or the Marketplace buyer who messages before you've even posted a price, or the shop owner who gives it a quick glance and offers you $50 cash on the spot. Sometimes those people are being fair. Sometimes they already know exactly what it's worth and they're betting that you don't. The whole pitch — "I'll just take it off your hands" — is built around the assumption that you haven't checked.
Checking takes 15 minutes. If what you find says $50 is fair, take the $50 and move on with your day. If what you find says it's a $400 item, now you know, and you can either hold out for closer to that or at least negotiate from a real number instead of from a shrug.
The information gap is the same here as it is at a used-car lot or with a contractor's bid — the other side has information you don't, and your only job is to close that gap before the money moves.
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