Things I’ve done to try to make a living without having to get a job

PART ONE

Hi, I’m Amber Eve — author of smalltown romantic comedies, and my long-running blog, Forever Amber. If you’d like to know more about me, start here. If you’d like to hear more from me, meanwhile, hit the button below.

I thought I had nothing to write about this week, but then this note from

Diane Shipley

about online surveys got me thinking about all of the different ways I’ve attempted to make money without having to get a job: which, as some of you may recall, has been my main goal in life for as long as I can recall.

(If you have a spare hour or so, there’s a lengthy post about why I don’t want a ‘real’ job here…)

My pursuit of this goal has led me to try many things now — many of which I’ve regretted to varying degrees — and I thought I’d list some of them here, so you could all laugh with me at that time I got sucked in by one of those ‘earn £600 in the next minute just by downloading and playing this online game’ adverts. But then I started writing about the first item on the list, and it ended up being an entire essay in itself, so now I’m thinking this might have to be a short series instead, depending on how many of you hit the ‘like’ button on this one.

(Yes, that’s a hint for you to hit the' ‘like’ button; it means that more people see my posts and hopefully subscribe to my newsletter, and then, if enough people do that, then one day THIS can be how I earn a living without making a job, and I can write about THAT. Yes.)

Maybe if this works out, I can take one for the team by trying out OTHER ways of making money online, and kind of road-test them, so other people can learn from my mistakes? (Well, I feel like SOMEONE should learn from them, and it’s pretty obvious at this point that it’s not going to be me, so…) Or maybe not, and we’ll just forget I ever mentioned this? We’ll see.

Anyway!

When I left my hated office job with absolutely nothing lined up to take its place, the first thing I tried was selling on eBay. Bear in mind that this was back in the day when eBay was still very much a ‘thing’, and the news was always filled with stories about people making a fortune by starting eBay stores. These would normally be accompanied by a photo of the person standing in their living room surrounded by boxes, and the implication was that right now those boxes were filled with seemingly useless old junk, but soon they would be filled with money. Boxes and boxes of money. Sometimes the person would be pictured standing in front of a brand new house which they would have bought with all of the boxes of money they’d made from their eBay store. Other times, they would be standing next to a car, and it would be a new car, and you would practically be able to smell that ‘new car’ scent through the picture.

“Why, I would like boxes filled with money!” I thought. “I, too, would like a brand new house and car, which I bought by selling things I found lying around the house!”

And so I started an eBay store.

It was called CherryRed (no, I have no idea why: I think I just liked the sound of it?), and, for some unfathomable reason, I even had business cards printed with the shop name on it, as if it was, like, an actual, real shop, that would make actual, real money or something. I had these made after just a few weeks of ‘trade’, and this was a sure sign of (a) How stupid I was, and (b) how very, very serious I was about my future as an eBay entrepreneur. An eBaypreneur, if you will. This would be my salvation. I would marry my love of fashion with my love of not having a job, and soon I would be giving interviews about my success from from the comfort of my shiny new McMansion.

Now, like I say, this was a time when eBay was still A Thing, and you could actually sell things on it for a reasonable amount of money. It wasn’t like Vinted, say, where you can list something worth £100 for £5, and someone will still offer you £2.34 for it. No, back in the Golden Age of eBay, you would list that £100 item for £0.99 on auction, and people would become so frenzied in their attempts to get one over on each other and win the thing that someone would end up bidding £254 for it.

Except, SPOILER ALERT, that never really happened to me.

I began my eBay non-empire by selling off everything I owned that I wasn’t wearing or using at the time. This, it would turn out, was a mistake, because then I had no clothes (I mean I had literally no clothes, by the way, not just ‘I had tons of clothes, but I didn’t like any of them’, which is what I normally mean when I say that…). But I was riding high on the fumes of a bunch of articles with titles like, “Unleash The Cash in Your Attic!” and “Your Closet Could be a Secret Goldmine!” and I really, truly, believed that this could be the case for me, right up to the point where I remembered that my closet was filled with cheap, polyester crap from the high street, because that was all I’d ever been able to afford, and, it turns out there really wasn’t much of a market for that stuff — not even in this Golden Age, when bidding wars were very much the norm, and there was even software you could use to make sure you got your bid in at the verylastsecond.

My closet was not, in fact, a ‘goldmine’, unfortunately. I did, however, manage to sell enough to convince myself I could make decent money from eBay if I just had better stuff to sell (To be fair, it wasn’t very hard to convince myself of this, because I am very gullible, and I was also very, very desperate to find a way to earn money, so I really WANTED to believe in it…), so I started visiting the local charity shops, in the hopes of finding, like, a vintage Chanel bag or something, tucked away on a rack somewhere.

(I think nowadays this would probably be considered very unethical, but, back then it was something all of the eBay articles advocated, so I’m afraid to say I didn’t give much thought to the idea that I was perhaps taking these charity shop clothes from some poor person who needed them more than I did; possibly because, at the time, I kind of was ‘some poor person’, and I figured desperate times justified desperate measures…)

Well, surprise, surprise, that didn’t happen either. I actually did turn up a few decent finds in those charity shops¹, but they were never things with a high re-sale value (Then, as now, it was already the case that you could sell second-hand ZARA for more than the original retail price, but actual, high-quality designer stuff wouldn’t get a second glance unless it was something like Louis Vuitton or another brand else Z-list celebrities had popularised at the time…), and because there weren’t actually any charity shops that were local to us, I’d have to travel to Edinburgh for them, which cost time and money I really, really didn’t have. Woe.

Next, I started ‘customising’ t-shirts. Yes. This was even more of a weird move for me, because I could not sew, and, also, didn’t have any t-shirts I could use, having sold them all on eBay already. But I somehow acquired some (I know I made that sound like I stole them, but I think maybe my mum gave me some of her old ones and I bought the rest?), and I would basically cut out the neckline to make it a boatneck, and then kind of ‘bedazzle’ it a bit. (I cringed so hard there it was actually hard to type that.) The t-shirts looked shit, even to me. Unsurprisingly, they did not sell. Not even one.

So, to recap, I had completely failed at selling on eBay, and there was absolutely nothing to suggest that this was something I was ever likely to succeed at. There was only one thing to do at this point: spend a lot of money on buying clothes from wholesellers, as if I was an ACTUAL shop owner, who knew what she was doing. I even bought a plastic dress form to photograph these items on, that’s how much I wanted this to succeed.

If this was a movie, this bit would be the montage scene. You would see me take delivery of boxes filled with clothes, which I would pull out and drape around the house, stroking them lovingly and holding them up to the light. Then it would cut to scenes of me and my friends (who I’d have roped in to help, because my business was growing so fast I could no longer handle it alone) packing them all up, probably while dancing around to demonstrate how happy and carefree I was because of all my money, and working late into the night to fulfill the hundreds of orders I was getting. There would possibly also be a scene with me throwing banknotes in the air, and it would be accompanied by a ‘fun’ pop song, such as you might find in the intro to a 90s sitcom.

That’s exactly what I thought was going to happen.

Like, EXACTLY.

In real life, it’s all a bit hazy. I remember spending a huge amount of time trying to source wholesellers who were willing to ship to me without requiring me to spend literally thousands of pounds on orders I’d have needed a warehouse for. I know there were very, very few who would do this, but I must have found at least one or two, because I remember the suffocating guilt of putting the orders on my credit card, and I definitely remember being stung by huge import duties which ALSO had to go on my credit card when the stuff finally arrived — normally many weeks later, and at the exact point where I’d almost given up on ever seeing it.

I don’t, however, remember the clothes I presumably bought from these services, which I’m guessing is probably my brain’s way of protecting me, because I DO know I spent much more money on this venture than I ever made from it, which was really, really not the point.

(WAIT! Handbags! It was handbags! I ordered some wholesale ‘leather’ handbags, and when they arrived, they were all plastic! Nice plastic, but … still plastic. Fun times. Fun times…)

Obviously, by that point it was clear my eBay selling career was over; that, instead of making lots of money and finally becoming financially secure, I had simply SPENT lots of money, and was now even worse off than before. As well as the financial disaster this had become, however, I’d also started to realize that I didn’t actually LIKE selling clothes on eBay. As in, I hated it. I hated ironing and photographing everything. I hated creating the listings. I hated answering multiple questions per day from people wanting to know where the ‘Topshop dress’ I’d listed was from, or asking for the exact measurement of the right elbow to left thigh on a coat. I hated having a stupid plastic dress form hanging in my spare room, like a weird, headless body.

Most of all, I hated wrapping up all of the parcels and having to take them to the post office, where the woman behind the counter seemed to be the only person in the world who hated working even more than I did, and who would demonstrate this by radiating pure loathing to everyone who had the temerity to try to post something via her counter. I hated this part so much that, when I had a lot of things to ship, I took to driving around all of the post offices in the area, giving a few packages to each, to minimise the inconvenience to each individual post person. Sadly for me, it turned out that every single post office was the same, in that the people running them always hated me on sight — even after I signed up to a thing that let me print my own labels at home (I had to buy a printer and sticky labels to do this, obviously, so that was more money down the drain…) purely to create less work for them — so, yes, that was the worst thing about it all, really. 0/10, Do Not Recommend. To this day, any time I have to visit a post office to ship something I’ve sold on Vinted (which I use purely to re-sell the things I buy on Vinted that don’t fit me, I hasten to add, not as some kind of renewed attempt at entrepreneurship…), I have to suppress the impulse to apologise profusely for using the post office for its intended purpose…

Despite all of this, though, the fact remained: I hated selling on eBay, sure, but I hated it significantly less than I’d hated every single ‘real’ job I’d ever had. Like, SIGNIFICANTLY less.

Naturally, then, I gave it one last go.

I ordered a couple of ‘job lots’ from eBay itself. These were essentially large ‘mystery palettes’ of women’s clothes, which the seller would bundle up and sell at a low-ish (but still high!) price so the buyer could separate them all out and re-sell everything at a profit.

Or, at least, that was the idea.

My one and only job lot contained two Diane Von Furtstenberg wrap dresses, which I sold for roughly what I’d paid for the palette, and still deeply regret not just keeping for myself.

The rest of the box was just a mix of cheap rubbish that smelt so strongly like the old clothes they were that I would literally gag every time I opened the cupboard I kept them in.

They did not sell. And, this time, I’m relieved to be able to say that I FINALLY took the hint and closed down my eBay store. My career in online retail was over. My journey towards financial security without the need for a traditional job, however, was only just beginning…

Until next week,

Ahem!

As you probably know, my current attempt at making a living without having to get a ‘real’ job involves writing small-town romantic comedies which are only very loosely based on my own life, I promise. You can buy them here.

1. One of them was a Chanel scarf, actually. I had no way of authenticating it, though, and eBay wouldn’t let me list it unless I was able to prove it was genuine, so I still have it to this day…