One of my favorite things to do is feature guest bloggers from outside the personal finance blogosphere who happen to be nailing it with some aspect of their finances. ElizabethAnne is a mom blogger who side hustles by using her artsy side. She makes really cool paracord bracelets and sells them using Facebook. What the heck? I honestly had no idea it was so easy to sell stuff on Facebook.

Making money or at least a regular paycheck usually requires a full time job but making a little extra money on the side, well that doesn’t.

I’ll tell you about one of the ways I make a little extra on the side but first let me ask you a couple of questions.

• How many of you have heard of Craigslist and eBay but either don’t trust them or don’t want to deal with setting up an account or membership, shipping, paying fees, or setting up a paypal account for payment? I have sold on both but find it time consuming.
• How many of you are on Facebook? Yup, my hand is up too.
• Now, how many of you make money or save money with Facebook? Not quite so many hands in the air anymore.
• Have you ever heard of, or belong to, a resale group on facebook? I am betting we are down to less than half of the original number of hands in the air now.

What ARE you talking about, you ask? Well, Facebook resale groups are a great way to make money and to save money. Think of them as thrift shopping and garage sale-ing online.

So how do you go about this? Well to start with you have to be a member of such a group. This is incredibly easy. There are a couple of ways to do this. To start with, I bet at least one of your friends already know about this. Look at your list of friends and, choosing local friends (and I stress local friends because you don’t want to buy or sell anything you have to ship), look up their Facebook pages and see what groups they belong to. Chances are someone belongs to a group and you can submit a request to join, or you can go to the search bar at the top of the page and type in your town’s name or county and just do a blind search. For example Adams county resale or Springfield swap. You can get lucky this way, but it can also be like trying to find a particular haystack in a very large field full of them.  Your third option is to start your own group but you may want to find and join another one first.

Most groups work in similar ways although they will each have their own set of “rules”. Usually the rules are common sense. Post your item with a description, location and price. Don’t be rude or crude. Remove your listing once it has sold.

Then you just post a comment on the resale group page. Generally a short description and where you are located at and how much you are selling for. Then add a picture, upload and voilà. You are selling your item. People that want it generally post a comment and you can set up a time to meet and exchange item for money. A good rule of thumb is if you don’t know the person meet somewhere public, like a grocery store parking lot.

These sites even have their own language. PPU stands for pending pick up, which means that someone has agreed to buy your item but the deal is not done yet. Sold generally means the item is sold and picked up, a done deal. Bump (in the comments section of your post) bumps your listing back to the top of the page. Generally it is frowned upon doing this more than once every couple of days.

For example:

Kids Snow Bibs dark blue sz. 7/8 Outbrook brand, small hole in one knee. $10.00

This is also a great way to find stuff cheap. Whether it is clothes, kitchen ware, decorating stuff, odds and ends, vehicles, houses and more. It has become one of the most popular ways to buy and sell (at least in my small part of the country).

A couple of things to note: what you post on a group’s page is only available to members of that group. It does not show up on your personal page. Your regular posts do not show up on group pages. You can join as many or as few groups as you want. You can list your stuff on multiple group pages (each one individually) just remember once it sells to remove your post from all or at least mark the item as sold. (This is just polite as the item is obviously no longer available).

Good luck and have fun.

ElizabethAnne is mom to 2 boys, and wife to her best friend, living in the Rural Midwest. When she isn’t helping at the family bookstore, lurking about on pinterest or doing the mom thing she is blogging about the mom thing on her new blog Oh Me Oh Mom. You can find her on Facebook.