Since closing my freelance business, I have racked my brain, ChatGPT, and Gemini for ideas on what to do next that could generate income without making life joyless. I plugged in a career assessment, a Big 5 Personality test, a VIA Character Strengths Survey, my resume, my triathlon training and race stats, and some blog posts I wrote about recovering from my bike crash in 2017 into both ChatGPT and Gemini. Both were good at coming up with great consulting ideas that fit my strengths, but no one is looking for them, and no one would ever pay for them. The business ideas all revolved around becoming a social media star or generating digital products in oversaturated markets.
Then I became a target of the algorithm, and because I spent more than ten seconds looking at Instagram and Facebook reels, I started seeing a lot of reels on refinishing furniture. Nice furniture and woodworking have always interested me, so it’s no surprise these reels caught my attention. Most of the reels showed people sharing how they made a generous living flipping furniture. So I entertained the idea of making it something I should consider.
Unless you want to deal with the nightmare of shipping or are refinishing hard-to-find antique furniture, FB Marketplace is the primary place to flip furniture. Made by Beau details the downsides of flipping furniture on Facebook Marketplace in his YouTube Video here -
He also explains the economics of furniture flipping and how the YouTube flippers make more money from your attention than from flipping furniture.
It doesn’t take much effort to look at what is available at your local thrift store, garage sale, or FB Marketplace and see what it will cost you to source the furniture to flip. Then look at what is being sold as refinished furniture on FB Marketplace. I see refinished furniture selling for $300 to $500 per piece, and pieces needing refinishing listed as free but unfixable, or $100 to $250. Even the free ones that could be repaired with wood filler and paint still sell for about $300. It seems like I would be making $7-$9 an hour refinishing furniture and dealing with people who often don’t follow through or nickel-and-dime you for your work. If I wanted to do that, I could have stayed a freelance web developer.
Since AI is hoovering the internet to build the database it uses to find the answers to your questions. You may be led astray because the intentions of the people the AI learns from differ from what they would suggest. There is usually more to the story. Garbage in, garbage out.
Things are rarely as simple as people tell us they are, or as simple as they seem at first glance. So why do we fall for people telling us that we, or society, are just doing it wrong and that if we just did X, we would be better off?