Million Dollar Challenge Day 4
This challenge is about starting with $125 and doubling my money every year for 13 years to get to $1,000,000.00. For a breakdown on this see Million Dollar Challenge Day 0.
Status January 8, 2021:
Year 1 Goal: $287.50
Cash account starting amount: $125
Cash account current value: $176.42
Investment account starting amount: $125
Investment account current value: $243.71
With the last update, I was going to fix the iMac computer I purchased (and upgraded with a replacement stand) so that I could resell it for a good profit.
What I couldn’t do was fix it.
After spending a few hours on trying to get it working, I realized that to fix it would take replacing a chip on the motherboard — something that I don’t have the skill to do, or the money to have someone else do.
The only option was to get rid of the iMac as a “parts only” computer for as much money as I could to try and recoup my loss on this item.
What I mean by “parts only” is that there are computers out there where the individual parts can be sold to people looking to repair their own computer. It’s the opposite of the phrase, “the sum is greater than the parts”. In the case of iMac computers, the individual parts can be worth alot more than the actual computer if it were complete and working. There is a fine profit to be made in parting out computers, especially Apple computers.
I didn’t want to take the time and effort needed to turn this particular computer into a collection of parts to be individually sold on sites like ebay or Craigslist. So I decided to offer up this computer as a non-working parts-only computer. Meaning that I was listing it up so someone else could take it apart and do what they will with the pieces.
The site I chose to sell it on was Facebook Marketplace for two reasons.
The first is that it is a little bit harder to be anonymous on Facebook Marketplace than sites like Craigslist. For Facebook you need to set up a profile that others can view. A Facebook profile without any information is a big red flag that that person is probably not going to be a trustworthy person to have a monetary transaction with.
The second reason is that there is no fee to sell on Facebook Marketplace for in-person transactions, and until recently, no fees for selling remotely through Facebook using their sales transaction app.
With that in mind, I listed the iMac up and was able to sell it within two hours of my listing going live.
The selling price was $190 with $50 shipping for a total of $240.
Shipping and materials came to $19.57.
That means that after the cost of purchase, upgrade, resell and shipping costs, I made $51.42 on the transaction. Not bad, but not what I had hoped for.
On the bright side, that’s a 30% return on investment.
That now gives me $176.42 to use for the next purchase(s) to try and flip for the Year 1 goal of $287.50.
Amazingly enough, the investment account in Bitcoin is going nuts. The growth in Bitcoin over the last few weeks has been unreal.
In the last 30 days Bitcoin has increased value by 114% (as of writing this). I didn’t purchase Bitcoin for this challenge exactly 30 days ago, so the value of my $125 purchase hasn’t quite doubled. But it’s very close!
A few more days of growth and the investment account will have grown enough to complete the Year 1 goal in less than one month. Simply astounding.
