Ella Richardson Facebook ad: “A $5 Sale Ended Up Paying for Softball Season”

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1138656759342123

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Insurance

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We sold a bread machine for $5 at our yard sale. Six months later, it's still the most profitable thing in our house — all because of one sentence the buyer said while I counted his change. Our daughter's $3,840 softball season depended on it. We sold a bread machine for five dollars at our yard sale. It out-earned the treadmill, the crib, and Ray's fishing rods combined. Not because of the five bucks. Because of what the buyer said while I made his change. I've done the math every month since. The bread machine still wins. Let me back up to tryouts. I'm 37. I cut hair at a salon two towns over. I open the Saturday chair at eight. I don't sit down until four. My husband Ray pours concrete, weather permitting. He drives a gray 2017 Ram 1500 pickup. I haul the kids in a blue 2020 Toyota Highlander SUV. A softball bag lives in the trunk like a third child. Nora is 11, Eli is 8. In June, Nora made the regional travel softball team. She cried in the dugout. Then the coach handed out the packet. $3,840 for the season. Uniforms, tournaments, hotel blocks two states over. They "helpfully" break it into $320 a month. That night Ray and I sat at the kitchen table with the packet between us. "Where does $320 come from?" he said. Not mean. Just honest. "Same place everything comes from," I said. "Fifteen here, thirty there." So we squeezed. I stopped turning down the 7 a.m. color appointments nobody wants. Ray took Saturday pours. Store-brand everything turned out to taste just fine. It still wasn't $320. The yard sale was my idea. "We have a garage full of stuff we keep for a life we don't live," I told Ray. "Somebody should be using it." Friday night we priced things on the living room floor. Nora made the signs — orange poster board, arrows, fat marker letters. The crib was the hard pile. You fold up a crib your kids outgrew and you're folding up two whole years, and then you write $15 on it. Saturday morning we pushed the gray Ram and the blue Highlander to the edge of the driveway. Strangers were on the lawn by 7:15, before the tables were set. The treadmill went for $30 to a man who will also never use it. The fishing rods went for $25 while Ray watched like it was a funeral. Nora ran the cash box with a mason jar beside it, labeled SOFTBALL in purple marker. That jar sold harder than any price tag I wrote. Eli sold cookies at a dollar apiece. He ate a third of his inventory. Around one o'clock, a man about my dad's age picked up the bread machine. He checked the paddle, plugged it into the porch outlet to hear it turn. He nodded at the jar. "Team fees?" "Softball," I said. "Thirty-eight hundred dollars of softball." He set the machine down and looked past me at the truck and the SUV against the garage. "Two vehicles," he said. "You run those through one of those comparison sites yet? Half this street pays a tournament weekend every month and calls it car insurance." I gave him the tight smile you give strangers who explain your own bills to you. I'd already been down that road. Back in June I'd stared at that line in our budget: $229 a month for the gray Ram and the blue Highlander. Two adults, clean records. My one blemish is a parking ticket from 2015, earned outside a hospital while my son was BEING BORN. I'd called our company. The woman was lovely: "You're already at our best available rate, ma'am." I called two competitors that same week — $218 and $251 for identical coverage. So $229 wasn't an overcharge. It was just gravity. I filed it under things you don't fix. I told him all that, shorter and saltier. He didn't smile back. "You shopped one phone call at a time," he said. "That's not shopping. That's asking permission." "I ran a hardware store for thirty-four years, and I priced against everybody at once, every season." "My wife and I pay $91 for two cars." Ninety-one. I remember because he counted out five singles for the bread machine right after he said it. That night we counted $386 at the kitchen table. Twice, because Nora insisted on verifying it herself. Then I pulled the site up on my phone while Ray dragged the folding tables back into the garage. You enter your vehicles, your record, the coverage you already carry. No credit card, nothing gets canceled by looking, No Spam Calls. It's the same one I used, right here: https://autoratesfinders.com/form/?c=23669&source=nv2u12s4c02aq It took about two minutes. Most of that was me typing slow because I didn't trust it yet. It came back with a rate as low as $87 a month. $229 to $87. Same coverage — I checked it line by line against our policy, sitting next to a shoebox of yard-sale singles. I carried the phone out to the garage and handed it to Ray. He looked at it for a long second. "That's $142 a month." "I know." "The whole yard sale made $386. This is a yard sale every month. Without hauling a treadmill to the lawn." We switched that Sunday. That was six months ago. Six times $142 is $852 that didn't exist before. The $320 team fee has a permanent $142 head start. And it doesn't depend on strangers wanting our old crib. It spread, too. My Saturday regular Dawn checked under the dryer — $312 down to $118 — and yelled it over the blow dryers. Ray's foreman dropped to $95, down from a $240 renewal. He tells the whole crew like a fishing story. And Nora's coach — I told him between games at a tournament — texted me a week later: "104??" No other words. Here's the whole thing, the way the bread-machine man would put it: it's a comparison site. The companies compete for your rate all at once, instead of you calling them one at a time like I did. You see your real monthly number in about two minutes. If it isn't lower, you close the tab and your day continues like nothing happened. Drivers who switch could save up to $950 on average. If you're a safe driver — no wrecks, no DUI — and you're paying over $150 a month for two vehicles, do what I refused to do for years: just look. Especially if there's a jar on your counter with a season written on it in a kid's purple marker. Take the two minutes and check your number — same site, right here: https://autoratesfinders.com/form/?c=23669&source=nv2u12s4c02aq Nora's team took second at regionals. The jar says NATIONALS now, same purple marker. The yard sale made $386 once. A five-dollar bread machine makes $142 every month. Best sale I ever made — and Ray still misses those fishing rods.

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A $5 Sale Ended Up Paying for Softball Season

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