Season 2, Episode 40: “90% Junk Removal, 10% Psychologist”

The Psychology of Decluttering

Alan Cook describes his role as "90% junk removal and 10% psychologist." He highlights the "Might Trap," where homeowners hold onto items because they "might" need them someday. He argues that if an item has no immediate use, it likely never will, citing examples of people hoarding spare siding, tiles, or scrap wood that eventually goes forgotten or becomes obsolete. The recommendation is to only keep items if you know exactly what project they are for and when you will use them.

Treasure Hunting and Scrap Metal

The show recounts several "treasure hunt" successes, such as finding $1,800 in cash hidden in books and shoes and discovering gold coins in a Wisconsin storage unit that sold for $650. Beyond collectibles, the business leverages the scrap metal market. By running 5 Craigslist ads for free metal pick up the company generated significant revenue from materials like copper (valued at $4/lb.) and aluminum.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 1:34

Hello everybody and welcome to the Junk Refund Show coming to you live from our new storage unit at Goody Self Storage Plus on East Goody Drive in Rockville, Maryland. That's G-U-D-E. Yours truly is cleaning out a home, very large home, for a lady named Gloria. She has very nice furniture and she's downsizing to a much smaller unit. And she has a bunch of very nice high-quality furniture that we need to have out of her house by Saturday. So Self Storage Plus on Goody Drive has a deal where you get the first month free. And they are also located right next to the metal to Rockville Metals, whom we use for our scrap metal drop-off, so it's very convenient. And they have a sign out in front on Goody Drive that says first month free. So what I did was I rented a$230 ten foot by 20 foot unit to put all the furniture in, and you get the first month free, so you just pay, I guess, uh some minimum fees and I I guess a little bit of insurance money. And it cost$46. And we just unloaded the first truckload of furniture from her house at the get at the unit, and I'm thrilled. So we were a couple of a couple minutes late getting started, but it was it wasn't uh BBS Radio's fault. That was my fault for being inside the unit. But I'm thrilled. I feel like we just started to set up our own little retail store inside of a storage unit that's going to be full of some very high quality, good furniture, and I'm happy about that. So hats off to my buddy June, who is here in the truck with me. We're doing this show live for you a little bit on the road today. Uh cleaning out the unit for Gloria and having a lot of fun. So you are listening to the world's longest running junk removal radio show. Now in our fourth year, and we are having a lot of fun doing it, and you're gonna hear some strange sounds as we go along, like what I what you just heard, this big truck backing up. But every once in a while we do the show live on the move, and that's what we're doing today from Rockville, Maryland. There you go. My buddy June is gonna put in the code to get us out of here, and then we're heading over to our next job. Um 100 Junk Refund is a junk removal business headquartered in the North Bethesda, Maryland area. We've been in business about 20 years. The thing that sets us apart is that we put up for sale the good stuff instead of taking it to a dump like our competitors, and if it sells, you get some money back. Which brings me to a transaction that happened about an hour ago where we've listed about$15,000 worth of furniture from Gloria's home. It's listed on Facebook Marketplace, and we've had a lot of success on Marketplace. I think we have a hundred and thirty reviews or something on Marketplace. They they rate you on a scale of one to five, and I think our score is like four point eight six, something like that. So that's like the ninety-fifth, ninety-seventh percentile uh for for you know people being pleased with our services and what we've done. And we are very happy with that as well. So now for a month, for 46 whopping dollars, I've got a storage unit that's gonna hold most of, if not all, of Gloria's good furniture while it's up for sale. And then we'll just pop over here and pull it out of the storage unit and deliver it to people and everybody wins. Um about an hour ago we sold one of her dressers, about a four foot high, foot and a half wide, foot and a half deep dresser for$75. We sold a uh table, a kitchen table that had a couple of leaves in it. That was kind of a bear because the thing wouldn't close all the way. And we had it up for sale with ten chairs plus a China cabinet for uh about nineteen hundred bucks. And a lady said, How much for just the table and chairs? And I said, twelve hundred bucks. And she came over to look at it, and lo and behold, to our astonishment, um, the table and the leaves were not all fitting together a hundred percent perfectly. They were kind of disheveled a little bit, which is embarrassing for me because I don't know how these things fit together. And anyway, with two trips to Home Depot and purchasing a couple of dowel units and drilling out one of them and replacing another one, finding that we still could not get the thing without the leaves to go together perfectly shut. But the lady, the young lady who's really nice, just needs it for her two kids, and she's gonna use one leaf in it anyway, and it works just fine with one leaf in it. So last night she offered us five hundred bucks and I took it. And so so what happens is Loria gets$175 of that or 35% from the sale of her broken table, and had this lady not made the offer of$500, we would have pulled the listing down because it turns out the table's not closing all the way, and you can't sell a broken item. So we kind of lucked out with that when we delivered it to her yesterday in Mount Erie, Maryland. She was very thrilled and happy. So that worked out well. Um so on to today, we sold one of her dressers for 75 bucks. We just hauled a dining room set with a hutch, a buffet, a table with two extensions, and eight chairs, all in immaculate condition, over to this new storage unit. We put it we put down an 11 by 14 handwoven oriental rug on the floor, which we've had in the back of our truck for a few days, which came from another job. Somebody paid 3,200 bucks originally for. We've got it up for sale for a thousand. And right now it's making the floor of our storage unit look like, you know, a custom uh, you know, gift shop or something. It looks great. So we have moved a sofa, a love seat, an ottoman, two lamps, two little stands for lamps, a china cabinet, two pieces, a buffet, a dining room table with two leaves and eight chairs, all in about the last two hours, to a storage unit that we didn't own when we started working this morning. That's gonna cost me a dollar and a half a day for the first month. And it's a ten by twenty unit, which means there's plenty of room to store stuff that's in there. So we're happy with that, we're okay with that. Um no problem at all with any of that. And so we're what you call happy campers right now. Um we uh in terms of just basic stuff, what we do, we we are a junk removal business with an eBay kicker. We we we haul away your junk, you pay us to haul away the junk, the rates are about twenty percent below the bigger junk removal businesses out there, and all you do is point to it and we will grab it and haul it out. We also recycle stuff like metal and wire. We donate items and get your donation receipts. The thing that sets us apart is the idea of selling something that's really in good shape, and if it sells, the clients get 35% of the sales price, and they get money back. There are jobs where people paid us$375 to haul away their stuff. You'll hear about this on the on the commercials during the breaks, and we turned around and sold their their home theater speaker system for$7,000 on eBay. They got about$3,200 back from that transaction. That was one of the first transactions we did. How would you like to do that? Pay$375 for junk removal and get$3,200 back, plus get your junk removed. You don't have to do any of the work. Now, that's a sweet deal by anybody's measure, and that's the way we like to do it. That's one of our stories. We have the world's best success stories out there, to be honest with you, and we're having a great time with it. We called, and I'll do a little shout-out to an auction company that is in Westminster, Maryland, um, about an hour north of the Rockville area, about an hour and a half north of Washington, D.C. They take items, especially cool collectible anti items and other things, put them up for sale, and if they sell, you get money back. So they're they're like a consignment place that'll sell stuff for you. We almost, and we may still run some stuff from Gloria's House up to them and just let them deal with it. They take anywhere from a 15% to a 50% commission, the smaller the sales price, the higher commission they take. The more they sell it for, the less percentage commission they take, which is a good thing for a client, and we may turn some stuff over to them and let them have some fun with it. But as for now, when you walk into Gloria's home, she's got a three-level home, a big home. The basement is all empty and done. The main level on the left-hand side is now cleaned out. She's still got some very nice furniture on the right hand side, and then she's got some nice bedroom furniture upstairs. And that stuff we will be dealing with tomorrow and Saturday. We just have to have everything out of there by Saturday, and now we have a brand new big storage unit we can use for a buck and a half a day. Um, that's only about five miles away from where the house is. So we think that's kind of kind of a cool thing. Anyway, so that's that's what's going on right now in the world of 1-800 junk refund. And it's a beautiful day here in DC. We do jobs all over the country, um, and we get calls from around the country, uh, assumedly because of this idea that we can sell your stuff and you don't have to mess around with it or worry about it. And that makes things pretty pretty good for everybody involved. And it's one of the funnest things that we do is to turn around and go back and give money to people because we just sold some of their stuff. It's like, you know, showing up for a publisher's clearinghouse with a small check or something. They they enjoy what we do and they enjoy the fact that they got something back and we took the time to do it. Now we get 65% of the sales price because we do all the work, they get 35% of the sales price, they do none of the work, and we think that's pretty generous. So you can make money off of your stuff because as we learned early on in this game, that not all junk is junk, and that is true. Uh, there's lots of good stuff that people just can't take with them. In Gloria's case, she's downsizing to a uh retirement community. She'll probably only have a one or two bedroom place. She's going from a four or five-bedroom place, just doesn't have room for most of her really nice furniture. And so we will take care of that and try to do the best stuff that we can with it. If it sells, she gets money back. If it doesn't sell, we go to plan B, which is to donate it, and and get her a donation receipt. And if for some reason they won't take it as a donation, we'll either try to, you know, give it away to some needy people, or we might just junk it depending on what it is and depending on what the situation is. So that is that is what we do in general. We do have a special deal. Well, let me tell you about Groupon for a second. We're we've been on Groupon. If you go to Groupon.com and look up 1-800 junk refund, you'll see over 500 reviews with about, again, about a 4.83, I think it is, out of five average score, which puts us in the 96 to 97% customer satisfaction range. According to Groupon, that is the highest in the country for a junk removal business. For any business, if you get up to around 90% customer satisfaction, you're one of the leaders in your industry according to Groupon. We're at 97%, and they've been doing it for years. As you know, when you go in on Groupon, buy a Groupon for a discounted price first, and then you get the services that you purchased. Might be for a restaurant, might be for a junk removal business, could be to get your rug shampooed, who knows? But in that same light, we do a special deal on the radio show that if you call into the show and you are in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, we will give you the same Groupon deal, which is a basically a pickup truck full of stuff. Describe it as a quarter of a 12-foot box truck full of stuff, but a full pickup truck is the same as a quarter of a 12-foot box truck. So it's a pickup truck full of stuff normally retail for$229, and you get it on the radio show for$79, and you can buy two of them if you want. The Groupon price is$99. So it's a great deal. You call the radio show$888-627-6008. Call the show during the show. You won't be on the air, but our producer Don will take your name and number, and then he'll contact me afterwards, give me the information, and then you can uh we will contact you and send you the link to purchase uh this special voucher. So on the radio show only,$79, a quarter truckload of junk removal hauled away, normally$229, a full pickup truck of stuff, and you can get it for$79 in the DC metropolitan area just by calling the radio show Thursdays between 3 and 4 Eastern, 888-627-6008. We're going to take a break real quick. I pulled off into this nice little park that I like to come hang out at sometimes. I'm in the shade, it feels good. We'll take a break for about a minute and then we'll be back. You're listening to the Junk Refund Show on BBSradio.com.

SPEAKER_00 17:08

Have you ever hired one of those expensive junk removal companies?

SPEAKER_02 18:08

So I'm your host, Alan Cook, and I am here in a park off of Gaither Road in Rockville, Maryland, with my buddy June. We're taking a break to do the radio show, and then we're going uh not very far from here, just a few miles from here, to do our next job. Um we will probably, in an average day, do four or five jobs a day, unless they're big, it's a big house clean out. And in that case, we might haul away two 16-foot box trucks of stuff in a day, just to give you a sense of this. I once asked some people at, I think it's called Soldier Fit. It's a fitness company that basically gives you a military workout and helps you lose weight and to get toned and all that stuff. I told them a little bit about what I do and any suggestions that they had, and they said, you know what, exercise is the last thing you need because you're physically doing this work all the time. Just watch your diet, that's the main trick. You're you're busy enough, and that's a good point. We get a lot of uh in fact we get paid to exercise in this business because we're always w you know, running around, going from job to job, loading up a truck, hauling away some stuff, and it's uh it's just fun to do, and it's fun to meet the people and fun to see what they're doing and what you know pe you get involved in people's lives sometimes at a you know critical point in their life when they're moving out of their home that they've been in for forty years and it's hard to say goodbye to some of their stuff because they're attached to it. And they also are wondering, how did we get so much crap in our house in forty years? And the answer is that you're normal, you bring home stuff, and over the course of forty years it adds up. I mean it's just that simple. So don't feel bad, you're normal if you have extra stuff in your house, at least in this country, and uh we're in the business of trying to help declutter that and make it a little bit better. I was with somebody recently on a job, I can't remember which job it was, it was in the last couple of days, and a lady was using the word might, and she said something about, you know, I might use this. Her daughter wanted her to get rid of some stuff, and she said, Well, I might use this, or you know, I might need this at some point. And I explained to her that that when you use the word might, might is the what past participle or something like that of the word maybe, and maybe means probably not, right? At least in our business. So if you catch yourself cleaning out or looking at stuff that you have in your home and you say to yourself, I might need that someday, don't go with the idea of hanging on to it because you might need it. The the point is you're probably not gonna need it and you're probably not going to ever use it. Which is why things get piled up in people's garages and in their sheds and you know, in their basements, because they kind of think, Well, I might need this someday, or that that item is in good shape, so I'm gonna hang on to it. It's not a question of if the item is in good shape. It's not a question of if it's a good item. The question is what is it good for now? And if you don't have an answer to that question, it's probably not gonna be good for your use a week from now, a month from now, or a year from now. So don't hang on to something just because it's in good shape. Hang on to it because you're com you you know for sure you're going to use it and even know what project you're gonna use it for. If you can't answer those questions, don't hang on to the item. This idea that I might use it is uh kind of an idea from past generations that for good reason held on to stuff because stuff was scarce, you know, a number of years ago. And you know, when you're at war or when you you're in a a depression or you hit a severe recession or whatever, then people get pretty creative and hold on to stuff and figure out, you know, I'm gonna do this or that with the stuff and I'll just make it work. But in in peacetime and even today where we've got a war going on, you know, it's still not a a a practical decision in my opinion to hold on to something because you think you might use it someday. The the irony of it too is that if that day comes when you're g you are going to use something like that, like some good wood that's out in your garage that you know your husband said he was going to build something out of it someday, he's gonna forget that that wood's there. He's gonna march right down to Home Depot. He's gonna buy brand new wood because he wants the best wood for his project and then he's gonna use that wood for what he needs and the scrap wood he's gonna say to himself, you know that's good wood too. I'm gonna store that in the garage too and then the pile of wood doubles out in the garage that he's never going to use. So just remember unless you can come up with an answer to the question of what is it good for you don't really have a good reason to hold on to it. It's just going to clutter up your house. We clean out homes all the time we did one yesterday um where some or excuse me Monday where some people said that um you know it we we are going to use this at some point it's good stuff we're gonna hold on to it so and so might need it or whatever it just doesn't fly. It just doesn't it really doesn't fly. So don't hang on to it unless you can do you can definitively say what you're gonna use it for and when and if you can't say that then you're kidding yourself that one of these days you're going to use it. You're just not going to use it. We the the other day on Monday we were cleaning out a garage and a lady has some pieces of siding in her garage four pieces of siding and people tend to not throw away the leftover original siding or the leftover original bricks or whatever it might be because they rationalize and say oh well you know they might need this someday. Now think about that for a second is a piece of siding on the house going to wake up on a Thursday morning and say that's it I'm out of here and just take off no why would you ever need three or four extra pieces of siding that have been indoors covered in the garage when the other stuff has been outdoors fading in the sun what are you suddenly going to use three or four pieces of siding for what's going to cause one or two pieces of siding to suddenly fall off it's not going to happen. And if a you know if a tree falls down on it then you know 30 of them are going to fall off and then you're gonna need a major repair. It's just the idea that we tend to it's human nature we tend to hold on to a few extra pieces of something like wood flooring or whatever tile or stuff like that. And we say to ourselves well in case you know a piece of tile breaks in the bathroom they'll have some extras well what's going to cause one piece of tile to break you know are you going to drop something on it and so you can break it? No. It's not just going to wake up one morning and say okay I'm gonna break I'm tired of this not going to happen. So this idea that I'm gonna hang on to it in case I you know I need some of this and it can match the stuff I have before and etc is not really a good reason to hang on to it. And so in our work in the junk removal business we are you know ninety percent junk removal guys and ten percent psychologists trying to help people deal with the stuff that they're currently hanging on to and that they really just don't need. So anyway a little bit of psychology you're getting for free here my dad majored in psychology in college maybe I've got a little bit of his blood in me or something but um just keep some of these things in mind as you're decluttering and as you're trying to have a little bit more of a simple life. A shout out to Facebook Marketplace we we have about$15,000 worth of stuff right now listed for sale on Facebook Marketplace. If somebody you know went in in the morning and looked at all of our listings and said man I gotta have all that stuff we'd make fifteen grand in one day. Wouldn't it be nice to have a hundred thousand dollars for sale on Facebook Marketplace or a million dollars worth of stuff for sale on Facebook Marketplace. And that's possible enough with enough stuff and enough inventory you can do that. And and aside from the money you make doing your jobs and hauling in scrap metal and all this other stuff um it's nice to have a little bit of a kind of a retail store set up where you can make some extra money doing this kind of stuff and you never know when somebody's going to call in and want to buy something. I think it's kind of a cool thing. People ask me in the years that I've been doing this what are some of the coolest things that you found in a home the first thing I usually think of is cash. We did a a job in Kensington Maryland a number of years ago and found$1800 cash in the house. It was a little bit of a tip off that that might be the case when you walk in the front door it had been evacuated for two years. The older lady had been living in there she finally passed away her son took over the sale of the home and he would go over and visit every once in a while but I think he basically went over to eat McDonald's dinner and watch TV because when you walk in the front door the first thing you see is a reclining chair sitting in front of a television and the second thing you see is a mound of maybe 25 McDonald's food bags piled up behind the chair and a a boatload of loose change on the carpet floor under the McDonald's bags. And so somebody would go to McDonald's buy their food come home take the change out of their pocket and for some reason just throw it on the floor and we used a dust pan to to move it through the shag carpet to scrape up all the change that was in this pile of change that was like two feet square that was on the floor. Then we started pulling books down out of the bookshelves in the main family room and$20 bills started flying out from the books. Then we went into the master bedroom and in the shoes we found you know twenty dollar bills rolled up inside the toes of the shoes and altogether we found$1800 worth of stuff in this house. The man had told us the son had told us look there's only three things I want to keep from the house the yellow ladder downstairs the baseball card collection in my old room and my mom's secretary desk everything else you can take. Well the$1800 fits into the category of everything else you can take but we know that the son didn't know that that money was in there so we called him up and told him that and I you know it's an interesting thing what happens when when your employees start finding cash in the house the dynamics changes right because then the question is well who gets the cash the employee find it or do they give it to the company or do you give it back to the owner? So we just stockpiled everything together that we found I called the owner I said hey we found eighteen hundred dollars over here in the house we want to give you a third of it we want to give a third of it to the employees for their honesty and finding it and telling us about it and a third of it to the company and the gentleman said you know what just take my third and apply it towards your bill that's fine with me. So we kept all of it and gave a third of it to the employees that were working the job that day they were very happy. So anyway you just some tidbits money is one we w we walk into a home in Cabin John Maryland one time and right there at the end of the entryway I swear he was about to talk to me and move was Yoda from Star Wars same size about three or four three feet high probably every little hair on his head and his little chinny chin chin was in place it was a it was a replica a made to look real Yoda that came from the Toronto Film Festival where these people went and saw one of the episodes of Star Wars. This was one for sale and they bought it and we actually turned around and sold it I think for around 400 bucks um to somebody but I'll tell you the funnest thing was that taking it home from the job was a blast because I put it in the passenger seat of the truck and then just drove down the street. And people would look in and see it put you know pull up next to somebody's stoplight and they'd look to their left and there's Yoda in the passenger seat riding shotgun. It was great and people would do a double take and a triple take and they would honk and they would give a thumbs up and stuff like that. And this little guy I I kind of wish I still had him but he was all everything he was ready to come to life and he was beautifully made it was an incredible thing and it was just one of those fun things that we found. We also did a job once a day it was raining we cleaned out some closets put some clothes in the back of the truck went to the dump the the bed of the truck was a little bit wet from the light rain and as we raised the bed up to dump the stuff um$50 bills started sticking to the bottom of the truck that had fallen out from the clothes.$500 we found$10 bills and um$500 that was about to get dumped luckily got saved and made us a few more extra dollars just from the job. So it is kind of fun in this business you get paid to go on treasure hunts and when you've done it for a number of years you have some pretty good stories and and those stories are worth something I think is it is it today is the first day of the NFL draft today the first day okay so tonight I think the NFL draft starts and we cleaned out a storage unit in uh God knows where Wisconsin I cannot remember the name of the city right now and maybe it'll come to me but it's one of these old Indian tribal names you know and we cleaned out a storage unit there and the lady it was a bunch of stuff that her husband had kept and he had passed away and the lady said yeah just get rid of all of it there's nothing here that I want and I asked her is there anything here you need or you want nope just take it all so they had a bunch of transparent um what are they called box not boxes but they're tubs kind of thing that you with a lid that you would just like store clothes in and stuff and one of those was a Green Bay Packers uh you know tub and inside that tub was an Aaron Rogers jersey number twelve and uh I hung on to that and there's a few more you know green bay packers items in inside there so that was kind of cool we found that but what was really cool is that underneath the Green Bay Packers stuff there were some little tiny boxes like flat boxes and you open those up and there's some coins in those boxes and some of those coins are gold. So our next job was in Chicago a few days later we pulled into a coin dealer in Chicago showed him the coins and he bought the coins for six hundred and fifty dollars it turns out that my my daughter's new f new husband is a big Green Bay Packers fan. So I gave him the Aaron Rodgers jersey he was thrilled and we made money for this lady she got about 240 bucks something like that from from us just looking in the bottom of one of these bins that the rest of the junk removal companies would have just discarded or if they had found it wouldn't have told her about it would have kept it for themselves etc so you all kinds of stuff like this that goes on but what's really fun is to call somebody up and say hey guess what we just made you know X amount of dollars off your stuff here's some money for you and nobody else does that in our business and that's what sets us apart and probably the reason why we get calls from around the country. We also have some fun with scrap metal jobs I'm I'm gonna take a break here in another few seconds and I'll come back and I'll tell you a little bit about some of the latest scrap metal jobs we've done and why we do those and the money that we make doing that and some of the things that you can learn about how to make money from scrap metal.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

So you're listening to the Junk Refund Show I'm your host Alan Cook coming to you from a parking lot off of Gaither Road in Rockville, Maryland and we're here in the shade so all is well we'll be back in a minute on a BBS radio network to talk more about how to get the junk out of your homes, out of your garages and also out of your life hey welcome back to the Junk Refund show coming to you from a park actually a parking lot in a park off of Gaither Road in Rockville Maryland where we're pausing for an hour to do the show in between jobs that we're doing.

SPEAKER_02 36:25

We just picked up a one month free storage unit that we just dropped a bunch of furniture in I needed a place to put a bunch of really nice furniture that is up for sale it's got to be out of a house by Saturday and we don't want to just take it to the dump there's money to be made here and we needed a place to store it bigger than the existing storage units that we have so we picked up a 10 by 20 storage unit at Goody Self Storage Plus off of Goody Drive in Rockville Maryland first month is free so it's going to cost$46 for a month I already paid that and that's a buck and a half a day for the next 30 days and we already dropped our first load of furniture off in this storage unit and it's currently up for sale so um hats off to them I really I really love this first month free deal that some of these storage units do. And in this case we got a decent sized unit that should be able to help us get some furniture sold and help make some money for us and for our client Gloria who is a terrific lady. Quick uh story from a couple days ago we have a guy named Richard um who is in Fulton Maryland he saw our ad on Craigslist to come and pick up scrap metal for free I do have to do a shout out for Craigslist um it is you know the precursor to Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and all of that stuff but it is a it is still a great place to go to find some services inexpensively so we do an ad and we put a few of them out there in the DC metropolitan area to haul away your scrap metal for free because we will get paid for it when we take it to the scrap metal yard um if you just have regular metal you get six cents a pound if you have copper you get four dollars a pound aluminum and brass and other metals are in between those two but that gives you a little bit of the range of of what you can get. So we you know we'll haul away refrigerators freezers restaurant equipment all this all this kind of stuff um and go pick it up for free and then if the customer has other other junk removal that they need done we tell them that they get 20% off our junk regular junk removal prices because they're already a scrap metal client. That's a great deal yesterday we hauled away probably 10 lawnmowers a couple of other lawnmower type looking items that were I don't know mulchers let's just say a bunch of loose metal um a decent amount of copper and some other stuff from a guy that we had helped out before he had us come back and haul away another basically a truckload of stuff and that worked out well so that was a big win um I it's really fun to go into these places these scrap metal yards and just empty your truck and get paid for it right they they give you cash and the boys at Rockville Metal have figured it out they have a popcorn machine in there and a small soda dispenser so you can pick up Sprite or Fanta Orange or whatever Coke of free drinks whenever you go in free popcorn June and I were each lugging down a thing of popcorn earlier today it's just a great customer service type of thing to do to make it enjoyable and fun to go in and do business with these guys. So keep if you want to make some extra money sometime look for scrap metal if you're not sure where people have it go on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist and just look for free stuff because people always have a washer or a dryer or a hot water heater or a microwave or some pots and pans or some batteries for cars or something wire to get rid of and if you go around and pick that stuff up and if you have some place to you know in the back of your SUV or even the back of your car for that matter um you can make some decent money going into a scrap metal yard and just doing this on a regular basis. So we put the ads out there the great thing about Craigslist is you can put an ad out there to Holoce people's scrap metal it's only five dollars for a 30-day ad and we make hundreds and hundreds of dollars off of these ads every month. There are months where we've made thousands of dollars off of a$5 ad. It's one of the best returns on advertising that I've ever seen and we continue to get calls from people like we did with this guy in Fulton Maryland a guy named Richard who had us come and he had we went there twice. The first time we he had this old trailer and he's just got a bunch of metal crap sitting in it and the f what we did the first time was hauled all that metal crap out. We left the trailer but he also had a basketball standard that he wanted hauled away and it was an old one and it was rusty and it didn't look good and he's getting ready to put his house up for sale so he wanted that cut off at the base. So we were thinking of using a reciprocating saw also called a sawzaw to just go in and and cut it off. That's a ver a a blade that just goes in and out in and out rapidly and then you you know cut it but we had a client that was a hoarder of power tools um I don't know six months ago maybe a year ago we did this job we ended up with a lot of power tools. One of those power tools is a a cordless uh circular saw that radial saw I think it's called that you can use to you know cut off different stuff and you can buy blades that are made from metal. Well I popped the battery on it yesterday or two days ago and we went we drove up to Fulton I just put it sideways around the bottom of the flag pole or the pole and just turned the sucker on and sure enough in like a minute and a half it had cut that pole and we took down the basketball standard and Richard was thrilled. In fact he said when he saw the basketball standard was gone he was really excited. He said hey here's a reward for you take all that copper wire over there in the corner of my garage and so we hauled away a wastebasket full of copper wire plus some other stuff and he's going to have us come back I'm sure and grab more stuff in the future so just be aware that anything that you have that is metal and you can tell if it's metal if you just get a magnet and stick the magnet to it and if the magnet sticks then it's metal. If it doesn't stick it's not it's not um sheet iron or what we typically call metal but that's an even better sign because brass, copper, uh you know gold, uh all these more valuable metals aluminum the magnet will not stick to it. It only sticks to regular metal. So if it looks like metal and the magnet doesn't stick that's a good sign because you've got something more valuable than metal that you can turn into cash by taking it uh into the scrap metal yard. It also works with sterling silver you can take sterling silver or old you know school rings or anything that has gold on it. If it's gold it'll be marked somewhere on the bracelet or inside The ring with the letter K like kilo in it, and it'll have a number in front of the K. That's what you're looking for to tell you if something is gold. If you look at it through a magnifying glass and you see that sign, that number that has a K behind it, it'll either say 10K or 14K or 18K or 24K. That tells you how many carats of gold this is made of. And you take that into any jeweler and they will buy it from you right on the spot, depending on what the price of gold is, which has recently been around$5,000 an ounce, which is a boatload of money. So you know, we can take a a a sixteen foot junk removal truck over to somebody's house and fill that sucker up with furniture, and then we turn around and and and we will charge people let's say seven hundred dollars retail price to fill up one of those. And most people get referred to us or something and so they get discounts. But we have gone into homes where we found one small bowl-sized container of jewelry and sold the jewelry for more than what we would get for a truckload of stuff. So it's it just kinda remember you know, you put you can put a cup full of jewelry in your hand and get more money than you will for a sixteen foot box truck full of junk that takes you two hours to load. So it's a value thing. Look for the value, look for where the money is, use your head more than you use your back, and you'll probably be successful in the junk removal business. So that's one of the ways that it that it works. It's just such a kick in the head to go into a jeweler and thirty minutes later come out with a thousand dollars with no lifting involved, right? And no gas and you know, no donations need to be made and all that stuff. Um if I could go do nothing but go around and pick up jewelry all day long, that would be a wonderful job to have. But if we sell that, by the way, too, people get thirty-five percent of it. So it we've had good things happen with that as well, and uh it's turned into money for us plus the clients that were involved. Um I mentioned, I think, on the last last week's show about San Salvador and one of the hobbies that I have. It's it's a great thing. This is jumping over into the idea of how to get the junk out of your life. Have some kind of a hobby that you really enjoy, a passion that is cu you you're curious about, it makes you happy, you look forward to doing it, etc. I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and we build temples around the world, two hundred and fifteen right now, something like that, are operating around the world. I love to go around and visit them. I've probably been to a hundred and twenty of them so far, and I always like to go visit a new temple. I get to see what it's like. We spare no expense in building these multimillion dollar houses of God, if you will. And I get to go in them, I can schedule appointments at any of them just by using my phone. It's amazing technology or what you can do with it. My most recent visit was in El Salvador, where I flew down to San Salvador for$58 nonstop on Frontier Airlines and about$150 to come back. I did it about two weeks ago, and I I left on a Thursday and I was back by Saturday night, and I was doing jobs on my way home from the airport Saturday night. It was a blast. It was just such a great 48 hours. And in the Washington, DC area, you have four different airports you can use to fly in and out of if you're willing to drive a couple hours up to Philadelphia. That would be your fourth one. But the having three airports within an hour of you drives the prices down and drives the competition up from the airlines, and that that's good for consumers. And so I I always like to do that. I buy the Go Wild Pass on Frontier Airlines, which is normally$599 for a year. Um, I think somebody sent me an ad yesterday showing on, I think it was on um Instagram that showed up for$399 for the next year. I'm a big fan of the Go Wild Pass on Frontier Airlines. If you're in a city that they service, and if you have a need to travel around the country for whatever reason, uh I'm a big fan of that. You can fly anywhere in the country for about 30 bucks or less using the go wild pass. You pay six hundred dollars a year for it normally. Right now it looks like you can get it for 400 bucks. Check that out on flyfrontier.com. And Frontiers planes are new planes. We don't have any, you know, planes that have been flying for 30 years in this fleet. They do a great job. Uh it is it is easy to get climb up the ladder and get extra bonus points and elite status and all this kind of stuff. And it's just a it's just a good story. I use them all the time. So check out the Go Wild Pass on Frontier Airlines. That's what got me in and out of San Salvador a couple of weeks ago for about 200 bucks round trip. I gotta do a shout out to the Wawa people out there, the people that own the gas stations and markets called Wawa, WAWA, they have two things going for them. Number one, the best ice in any drink machine in the country is in Wawa. You can quote me on that. And second, the cups that you put the ice into have lids that are spectacular where you don't you can put a straw in it if you want to, but you don't need to because they've got a cut to where you basically put the lid on top and then you just tip that thing up and you're drinking to, you know, heaven's delight out of this cup. I literally hang on to these cups for weeks after I have a c chance to go to a Wawa because I love the cup so much. They're big, they hold a lot of liquid, and that's my kind of drink. So shout out to Wawa. It's amazing to me, and I told this to the general manager of the store that I was at recently, it's amazing to me that somebody will walk into a convenience store and even even search them out just because of their ice. Right? I mean think about that. I'm not going there because their donuts are the best, I'm going there 'cause I like their ice. Right? And I'm not really gonna eat the ice. The ice is gonna make my drink colder. But it's the ice and it's the cups. It it's an amazing story. It really is kinda cool. And I'm uh I'm kinda thrilled to be to to have these big containers that I reuse and reuse and reuse um full of ice and full of liquid, which just makes life better when you're out driving a truck around and hauling away people's stuff. So somebody at Wawa had a brilliant idea to use the cups and the ice that they're using because it works really well. Um, I do have to put in a sh a shout out, speaking of you know, stuff you can do in your life that is just fun that gets some of the junk out of your life. If if you've if you've ever wished you could sit down and be a Disney animator and draw the characters that Disney draws, you know, the Disney people draw, you can do that now. There's a website that my daughter my youngest daughter told me about years ago called Easy Drawing Tutorials dot com. And if you go to that website, um you will pull up they have all different kinds, I don't know, uh a hundred maybe, of animated characters that your kids know or you know, or whatever. So famous Disney characters and Marvel characters and etc. And then you click on the one that you want to draw and it will take you through about sixteen steps and teach you how to draw a particular character that they have listed there. I did this recently with Aurora from Sleeping Beauty because a friend of mine has a daughter who just turned five yesterday, and and when I asked, you know, who's her favorite Disney princess, she said Aurora, and that's one of the ones that's available. So a couple of nights ago I took out an eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper, and over the course of two evenings, maybe a total of three hours, something like that, I drew and colored in Aurora, an original drawing for her daughter for her birthday, which was yesterday. So it's just a it's a wonderful thing to be able to follow just follow an outline and basically draw on a sheet of paper what you see on your laptop or on your iPad, and pretty soon you too are a Disney animator, and what's really fun is to draw one of these and then show your friends, you know, especially when it looks like what it's supposed to look like, and then you announce that you drew it, that it you you know it wasn't purchased off of some Disney website or something. And I will tell you this too, and this is a closing thought that has a lot to do with life. When you do these drawings, you take a number two pencil with a very sharp point and you just start to draw freehand what you see on your laptop. And I guarantee you that you're not gonna get it right the first time, and you're probably gonna have to, you know, take ten or fifteen shots at it before you're gonna get it right. The toughest thing to draw on these faces are the eyes. And I typically you know will redo the eyes a dozen times before I get them looking the way that they look on the laptop. And the greatest tool in your hands while you're doing this is not the pencil that you're drawing with, it's the eraser that you're getting rid of your mistakes with.

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Right?

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I I erase a lot more than I draw and I and I am thrilled for and I I you know, I have a number two pencil with a sharp point, but I have a very wide kind of eraser that I would use in third grade to to wipe out my mistakes. And the great thing about easy drawing tutorials is that you can erase and erase and erase and keep doing it over and over and over until you get it right. Now, there's an analogy built into that about how to go through life, right? You're probably not gonna get something right a hundred percent of the time on your first shot. It's probably gonna take a few attempts. You're probably gonna have to keep trying and keep trying and keep trying. Um but thank God for erasers because especially in the artist realm, because they wipe out your first, second, third, fifth, twelfth, and twenty-seventh attempts as though you never made those attempts, it wipes it out and gives you a chance to do better. And when you have that ability to wipe out your mistakes and then just simply try to do better, pretty soon your drawing looks like the drawing that the pros did and looks like the way it's supposed to look. And that's a great feeling, uh, to feel like, hey, I just drew something that looks just like, you know, Aurora, or just look looks just like Belle or looks just like, you know, Ariel, the exact way the pros from the Disney Animation Studios draw them. So easy drawing tutorials.com. Go have some fun with that, even if you think you can't draw, just go try and keep erasing until you get it looking like the step that you're working on, and then go to the next step, and pretty soon you'll be a pro. I showed one of these to some friends last night and they died. I showed them the picture first, I didn't tell them that I drew it. It was one of Cinderella that I did back in 2018, and then I announced that it was my work and that I drew it, and they were stunned. So, anyway, you can have some fun with that. EasyDrawingTutorials.com, a great way to come up with a customized gift for somebody, and a great way to stretch your talents and do some fun stuff. That's the kind of stuff we bring to you on the junk refund show. It's not just always about hauling away somebody's furniture, it's about how to have a better life, and that's why we're on the planet is to have a great life. So listen to us next week on the junk refund show. Thanks to Don Newsom, his brother Doug at the BBS Radio Network for all the great work that they do. And check out any of our past episodes on the on our podcast. Just go look for the Junk Refund Show or go to BBSradio.com and type in junk refund show, and you'll have all the episodes there as well. And enjoy the episodes. We have a lot of fun and we're happy. So that's what it's all about, right? See you next week on Thursday at 3 o'clock on the Junk Refund Show. I'm your host, Alan Cook. Have a great week, everybody.