Midlife Beginnings

After a Summer of working hard, I’m finally taking my annual Summer vacation. It feels great to kick back in my garden and just watch the breeze stirring the trees, silhouetted against a bright blue sky. It’s been unusually chilly in Brooklyn for the past few days, a welcome treat in August.

In fact, I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit in front of the computer for four days now, not even to write a post on my blog.  My break from all things electronic has felt good, but the creative urge is beginning to stir again.  That’s the way it always works for me — I take a vacaiton and after 3-4 days I have begun to decompress.  Then I get some good, creative days where I get a lot done.  But the next thing I know I’m back at my day job and I don’t get time to execute my ideas.

I had been thinking about quitting my job and living on my income from book sales.  I’ve written in the past (before Wordpress did a number on my blog) about how I find and sell books online in my spare time.  There was good money in this a couple years ago.  Even last year I’d find several hundred dollars worth of books per weekend with not much effort.

Since the stock market melted down last Fall though and layoffs hit New Yor City, things have been different.  Books still sell online, as well as they ever did, but it is much harder to find inventory than it used to be.  Yesterday I decided to head into Manhattan and hit the thrift stores. I started around 10am, and hit every single thrift I know of south of 96th Street.  I came home with a grand total of 12 books, worth about $90.  In the past I would have found at least $500 worth of inventory on the same trip.  This means I earned about$8 per hour of work, before the government takes their taxes and Amazon takes their fees.  All Summer it has been like this.  I don’t know if it is because the thrifts are selling online now, or if it is because the number of people scouting has increased, but it is getting really tough out there.

From what I see, quite a few unemplolyed professionals have been trying to make some money at selling books online, and they are beginning to look ragged and hungry. Many people have enough saved up to get by for a few months, but after unemployment and savings run out people get desperate.  And there are a lot of desperate people out there, with more and more joining their ranks each day.  It makes sense that I’m seeing this now, about a year after the layoffs really began in earnest.  There are not many layoffs now, but there are also not many companies hiring, so I expect things to get worse over the next few months.  This makes me thankful I have a day job.   I feel for the people I see in the thrifts who have spent money to start an online book selling business, buying expensive book scanners and listing software.  You can still make beer money scouting for books in Manhattan but unlike last year, you will not find enough books to make a living, not even a very frugal living.

This tells me that I am going to need to figure out how to create another stream of income.  I have a cultivated  connections that keep my book business going, but if something were to happen to them, it would not be good.  As is usual, I’ll have all kinds of ideas over the next several days, and may even begin executing on a couple of them.  But then my vacation will be over and I’ll be back at my banking job, and won’t have time to bring any of them to fruition.