She Turned $1 Into $5,000 With This Overlooked Side Hustle⏐Ep. #257

Mindi Reinke (0:00)

If you're looking for something that is basically free, that has a low time investment, and that you could do with only your phone, the book Arbitrage is so wild. The barrier to entry, it's non-existing, because you don't have to buy a palette.

Chris Koerner (0:12)

You turned $1 into $5,000.

Mindi Reinke (0:15)

Since then, we've bought more palettes, all for $1. I was spending maybe three hours a week on this.

Chris Koerner (0:21)

You had no presence, no account, no following, $75 an hour. If you were doing this as like a full-time business, 40 hours a week, that's $150,000 a year.

Mindi Reinke (0:30)

He has an over million-dollar book operation. The time constraints of being a mom, there's only so much time in the day that I can dedicate to this. I snap the pictures and then AI literally does everything else for me.

Chris Koerner (0:42)

Your husband's a firefighter, you're a stay-at-home mom, you just had your fourth child, you're limited on time, limit on resources, but there's no excuses. So I applaud you for that. So last week, I came across this lady on Twitter that is buying pallets of books for $1 and selling them for $5,000. This can be done in any market on multiple different platforms. It's not sexy, but it's very, very profitable. And it's kind of funny because this business wouldn't even be possible before ChatGBT because there's a lot of tediousness to it that ChatGBT completely solves. So if you've ever wanted to make thousands or tens of thousands of dollars from getting free books and selling them, or if you want to learn more about whatnot and live selling and how to take $6 items and sell them for $40, this is the episode for you. Please enjoy.

Mindi Reinke (1:29)

So my husband was looking to build a home gym. We bought this property. We live in a really small town. We have some acreage. So he built his dream shop, this big 40 by 60 shop. And he wanted to make a section of it into a home gym. So he's on GovDeals looking at liquidation equipment. Schools are getting rid of their gym stuff all the time. And so he finds one that's near-ish to us. And he had been trolling this site for weeks and weeks looking for this equipment. And I had never paid attention to it. But he was like, hey, this is interesting.

They have some kid stuff on here. So I get on there and I start looking and they have these book palettes. And like being a homeschool mom, I have this like book addiction. It gets weird. You're like, oh my gosh, I need to go to my home library.

Chris Koerner (2:17)

We're not even homeschoolers, but we have the same addiction.

Mindi Reinke (2:20)

It's just a beautiful part of childhood. Just having like a rich literature environment has been super important. So I see these palettes of books on there and I'm like, what? You can buy a whole palette of books for a dollar? Like, what is this?

Chris Koerner (2:32)

Oh, wow. They're just throwing them away basically.

Mindi Reinke (2:34)

Yeah. At this point, I didn't realize the scale of it and the accessibility of it. Because this entire thing is brand new to me. So I make an account side by side sitting with him at the dinner table, and I throw a bid on it, because I don't know that a bid is binding. Like, you put a bid on there and you win it. You've got to go get it.

Chris Koerner (2:55)

Yeah.

Mindi Reinke (2:55)

He's bidding on-

Chris Koerner (2:56)

What was your bid for?

Mindi Reinke (2:57)

A dollar. I just bid a dollar. I'm like, there's no way I'm going to get this for a dollar.

Chris Koerner (3:02)

Yeah.

Mindi Reinke (3:02)

He's bidding on all this exercise equipment.

Anyway, it comes to the closing of all these auctions. He lost every single exercise equipment that he had put on. And I won the dollar book palettes.

Chris Koerner (3:20)

And he'd been investing weeks into this. And you're just like, I don't know, let's freaking throw a dollar bid in there.

Mindi Reinke (3:25)

Oh my gosh. He was like, we have to drive, we have to tow the trailer to go pick this up. What are we going to do with all these? And I'm so excited. My home library is about to be so epic. So again, at this point, I'm not even thinking about selling these. I'm just thinking this is a treasure trove. This is going to be so fun for me and the kids. So we drive out. It was actually three and a half hours from us. It was not a small jaunt. We get these pallets, we bring them home. The kids and I are going through them. And I was like eight months pregnant. So these ended up sitting for, I don't know, several weeks. We're in the middle of this big remodel. We added like an entire second level to our home. We've got kid number four coming in hot.