I’m a car boot queen – I’ve made £30k from selling your junk…including £3,600 on dumped football collectibles

MORE and more people are turning to side hustles for extra cash, with two in five of us giving one a go.

The latest big thing is bagging bargains at car boot sales then selling on for a profit.

Jeanette Davies, 60, paid £130 for two teddies in Monmouth recently, then sold one at auction for £3,800.

Going to boot fairs has also made Connie Chan, 28, serious cash.

Here, she tells Kirsten Jones how she does it . . . 

Turning up to the muddy playing field at the crack of dawn, boot sale queen Connie scans the sea of cars for her next big find.

So far, she has made an astonishing £30,000 selling all things second-hand.

Connie, 28, an accounts assistant, is not afraid to put in the miles from her home in Merthyr Tydfil in her pursuit of her next great bargain buy.

Having gone without weekend lie-ins for five years, she reckons the secret to her line of trade is knowing how to spot hidden gems among the piles of worthless junk.

She says: “When I first started car booting I’d spend hours wading through cheap tat, hoping to find a diamond in the rough.

“But now I can spy a star buy in seconds. I can make hundreds, even thousands of pounds, and I only buy items I know I’ll make ten times the profit on.

“I grab vintage sports tops for 50p and sell for over £50, and buy old Apple mice, keyboards and iPods for a tenner and sell them in bundles for hundreds.

“People love cameras from the Noughties. I’ll pick them up for £1 and easily sell them on for £30 a pop.

“It’s amazing how much people will spend on this stuff on eBay, Gumtree and Facebook Market-place. If it was in their house they’d dump it without knowing how much it’s worth.

“By snapping up items and selling them on, I’m giving them another life. Why should I feel bad about that?”

Connie had her first taste of boot sales at age three when her grandparents took her along to their local one.

She loved the buzz as shoppers haggled with sellers over prices, and recalls: “It was exciting, like a rugby scrum as shoppers elbowed in and shouted their bids.

“Money was tight when I was young but every now and then my grandparents would take me to a stall and pick out a teddy or toy for me. I didn’t care that they weren’t shiny and new — I was just so grateful that they thought of me.”

When Connie was 23, she began to see the sales as a way of making money.

What began as an occasional visit to local car boot sales became a weekly routine.

In her spare time she scoured the news for rare finds which were making other people rich.

She also followed enthusiasts on YouTube to track the changing trends.

Within weeks, she’d made her first big sale.

“It all started as a fun hobby, until I bought an Olympus MJU 2 film camera for £10 and sold it for £250. Then I realised I could make a fortune.”

Since 2018, Connie and her partner Liam, 28, a courier driver, have spent every weekend at boot sales where they part with up to £400 a day.

She reveals: “We can easily visit six sales in one weekend. But we don’t always make big bucks. It’s so risky buying electricals like computers, TVs and headphones — you don’t know if they work until you take them home.

“And if they don’t, they won’t sell and your money is wasted.”

But the rewards can be great.

She adds: “I once spent £400 on collectibles like football and Pokemon cards, signed shirts and outdated tech. I took it home, put it all on eBay and made £4,000 — not bad for a few hours walking around a field.”

‘It’s easy to make some enemies’

Connie hunts for specific items including old Apple devices, sports shirts, video games and collectibles.

Connie’s earnings pay her household bills — and every now and then a whole lot more.

Her biggest success came in 2019 at Splott Market in Cardiff after paying £60 for a GameCube video game console, and bundle of video games.

She then quickly offloaded the lot, and says: “A sealed Mario Kart: Double Dash game sold on eBay for £770. The rest of the games and the console sold for another £500. Seeing my bank balance jump up was such a rush.”

By 2020, the couple, who live together, used a chunk of the money to buy a van and travel around Europe.

Connie says: “We bought it for about £8,000 and spent another £8,000 making it a house on wheels.

“We then left our jobs and hit the road for six months, travelling through France, Spain, Italy, Croatia, Austria, Belgium and Germany.

“Car-booting made our holiday dream come true.”

Connie may make buying and selling sound easy, but it comes with its challenges.

She says: “Being a regular at sales gets you a reputation, and it’s easy to make some enemies among the stalls.

“I bump into other buyers all the time and catch their eye, but keep my distance.

“They can be really aggressive when they’re haggling and bully sellers into rubbish sales.

“I often see people snatch items out of others’ hands and bombard sellers with threats like, ‘This won’t sell for more’ or, ‘You’re making a mistake’ to force a low deal — it’s really unfair.”

But Connie is undeterred and will carry on making a living out of others’ cast-offs.

She says: “I can make over £1,000 a month so why would I stop?

“My life is so much easier with the extra cash.

“Without it, I’d spend my whole salary on rent and bills and barely save a penny for holidays — life would be so dull.

“People think car boot sales are tacky or full of old people selling rubbish, but their loss is our gain.

“You’ve got no idea how much treasure you’ll find.”