I love garage sale season.  In a previous article I listed having a garage sale as being a great summer activity for families.  It’s also a great way for children to learn about money, so I took my own advice and my kids and I put on a sale last week. 

Involving my kids in the preparations was interesting.  I thought they would be excited to make a little money from the sale so I told them to clean out their room of any unwanted toys.  My oldest son promptly reminded me, “You never paid us from last year’s sale.”  Oops!  I quickly fixed that by giving my boys a couple bucks and realized this year I had to keep better track of the sales so I can keep up my end of the bargain.

I rely on my boys’ help when getting stuff ready for a garage sale, so I like to reward them with a cut of the profits. In addition, this year I wanted to teach them some lessons about money.

The concept of working hard in order to earn money is one lesson I’m sure my boys learned with this year’s garage sale experience. What started out as a fun game of going through their toys, quickly became somewhat of a chore.  They realized they needed to wash dirty toys and find all of the missing pieces to some of their playthings.  However, with the notion of making a couple bucks foremost in their mind, they trudged on.

My boys caught on to the fact that once a toy is bought from a store and is used – it loses value.  That became apparent when we were pricing our garage sale items and they realized how much we were able to charge for the toys was significantly less than what we paid for them at the store. They learned you can buy something second-hand that is still in good condition for much cheaper than if you buy it brand-new.

Finally, my 5- and 7-year-old eagerly added up customer’s totals, took the money and helped make change for people.  A great lesson in math and money-handling.

All in all, it was a positive learning experience for my children as well as a much-needed cleaning, organizing, and clutter-reducing activity for me.  I have a feeling inevitably more clutter will make its way back into my house by next year, but then it just means it’s garage sale time again!