If you are frustrated trapped at home during the pandemic and need a little additional income and something to keep your mind functioning, here are a few suggestions. It seems that everyone in most families like riding bicycles. There are many degrees of dedication to bike riding from just a few leisure rides every week to the ardent rider that rides daily and accumulates many miles in a weeks time.

If you like to read there is a book called “Bicycle the history” that can be purchased on eBay used quite reasonably for somewhere between $6 and $10, it originally sold for $29.95. The book is loaded with old actual photos of bicycling dating back to the 1860’s when inventors were working on an iron horse to replace horses as the mode of travel. For many years there were cycles called “Velosipede” which required the rider to use their feet on the ground to move the cycle , it was not until the late 1800’s that bicycles were made that look anything like those we have today. The high wheel bicycle which had a really large front wheel up to as much as four feet and a small back wheel and foot hoist that the rider would use to propel themselves onto the seat near the front of the velosipede. That style of bike was prevalent for about ten years after the civil war. Bikes were used for pleasure , deliveries, and travel.

I have been riding a bicycle since I was nine years old. I got a paper route at age eleven that required riding over a mile to pick up the papers and another mile to where the route started and four miles on the route at 5 A.M. every day. The distance did not phase me one bit at that age. But now you mention to someone do you want to ride five miles just for fun they panic and think that is too much. I had paper routes for four years and then worked in the mailroom of a newspaper for three years. I traveled many miles on a bicycle for my paper route and running errands for my parents.

You ask what does that have to do with making extra income and the pandemic? A bike ride every day to alternating locations even for just a couple of miles or so can raise the spirits of a person. I started a bike riding group at a 55 and over mobile home park in Arizona. I named them “The Wild Javalina’s kind as a joke after the movie “The Wild Hogs” came out. We had as many as twenty people riding every morning at 7 A.M. One day we took lightly traveled roads towards Superstition Mountain and back to the park, the next day we took lightly traveled roads from Apache Junction , Arizona to Mesa Arizona. We traveled a little over three miles on each of these round trips. In Mesa there are parks with nice sidewalks that we would ride on and enjoy the park. I put odometers on my bikes and encouraged the people riding with us to do the same. It is funny that when you know how far you have traveled it encourages you to want to travel just a little bit further each time. In six months I put one thousand miles on my bike just going on short rides.

When I looked at the people riding with “The Wild Javalina’s” and their bicycles, some of them had horrible bicycles and would give up riding with us because they could not keep up. When I returned to Colorado I decided while in Colorado Springs I would purchase a bike on Craigslist for me to ride at my son’s home when we ere visiting there. When I went to pick up the Diamondback Insight bicycle I had to meet the person at a storage shed he was renting. He had nine bicycles in the shed, another fellow across from him had a big shed and had over twenty bicycles in his shed. The person getting the bike for me explained that his wife spent more than he made as an engineer and he needed supplemental income so he decided to buy about ten bicycles a week on Craigslist at prices he considered low for the bike and resell them at a price $30 to $50 more than he paid for it. He said he made twelve to fifteen hundred a month , he added the guy across from me works at selling used bikes full time and made over thirty thousand dollars last year. These two men did have an advantage that some people may not have, Colorado Springs is a town with a large military presence. Military people are transferred out on short notice and want to sell a lot of their possessions quickly at a bargain price. I decided right then and there I was going to sell used bikes at the 55 and over RV park where we lived in the Fall and Winter in Arizona.

I rented a storage unit to store the bikes because RV parks will not let people run businesses in the parks. I purchased nine bicycles, some men’s and a few women’s. I sold seven of the first nine rather quickly making an average of about $30 a bike. I would only buy bikes that did not need work on them, I was not a bike repair person. Also I learned that people are not as receptive to some makes of bicycles as others. In a six month period not really pushing it, I sold about seventy bicycles to the surrounding parks and general population averaging about $35 profit on each one. That was five years ago. I printed photos of my bikes and put them in self service laundries and on the RV Park bulletin boards.

Times have changed. The prices for many bicycles have increased quite a bit in the last year in particularly. Also the quality of the bicycles has declined for new lower price bikes at Walmart and the big box stores. I bought a Roadmaster bike at Walmart and road it on a three mile ride, that was the worst bicycle I have ever ridden. I took it back the next day. Case in point, if you decide to try buying and selling bicycles, stick to known brands that people like that are better quality for a low priced bicycle. I only buy and sell Schwinn, Diamondback, Trek, and Specialized bicycles that are in very good condition and are priced right. As you look through the bikes shown on Craigslist or Offerup, there are a lot of very high priced bicycles that listed for several thousand dollars. There are others selling for three hundred to a thousand dollars. Then there are people that explain that the bike was sitting in their garage for several years and they need to get rid of it, those are generally the people that are willing to sell their bike for a low price and possibly negotiate the price. I have purchased bikes that look brand new and really are brand new because they were never used, a person got them as a gift or bought the bike and did not like bike riding so the bike sat in the garage. Just yesterday I purchased a bike for $80 a Schwinn Link series City 1 , the owner apologized because he said you might have to replace the back tire it is flat. I took a tire pump to pick up the bike pumped the tire up and the bike looks like it just came off the showroom floor. I took photos of the bike this morning and listed it on Offerup for $135, over twenty people have looked at it but no buyers yet on this one. That bike originally sold for $319. I sold a Kent bicycle I purchased new five years ago for $70 using Offerup two days ago.

Warning about Craigslist, the technical support at Craigslist is totally unresponsive. In this area if you click on the contact block at the top to get contact information you get an error message and cannot see the contact information, consequently people are not able to respond to your ads even though they let you put ads on Craigslist. They have a form to report problems and there are many comments and articles about the problem with the contact button. They tell you to clear your cache and it will work , eliminate cookies , use FireFox as your browser, none of those things solve the contact button problem. I tried it on five different computers and for Craigslist in Phoenix, New York City, and Colorado Springs the same problem exists for the whole Craigslist system. I have sent three messages on the Craigslist website form to technical support over the last two weeks and got no response.

We went through the garage last week and my wife’s three wheel Joy Rider tricycle was taking up a lot of space out there and she never rides it. That trike is currently selling for $995, when we got it they were selling for $750, that is an example of how much prices have increased in recent years on quality bikes and trikes. We purchased the Joyrider for $350 five years ago used, it looked like new. I listed it on Craigslist and got no replies because their system has not been working. I listed it on eBay and got a reply right away from a person in Phoenix that wanted it for her 96 y.o. father. We live fifty miles south of Phoenix in Casa Grande, the lady’s husband borrowed a pickup and came and got the Joyrider a week ago, we sold it for $360. The 96 y.o. father came with his son-in-law to pick it up. The elderly man pulled out a photo he had been saving for fifteen years of a Joy Rider that looked exactly like the one we sold them. He said he had been looking for one all that time and was so excited when his daughter saw that the one listed on eBay was so close to them and was still available. There is up to a four month waiting period for a new Joy Rider. I guess they do not make a lot of them?

We had a Solo Fire Pit Ring still in the box that had been given to us. We cannot have open fires in our backyards in this HOA so the fire pit just sat in the garage. I looked up on the internet to see what that model was selling for. It was on sale for $189 for the Christmas holidays, so I put a price of $110 and listed it on Offerup. Fifteen minutes after I put it on Offerup I got a response from a gentlemen that lived fifty miles from here. He said he wanted it and would come pick it up now. He was a younger fellow with little kids and said his kids were very excited to have a fire that evening.

If you have crafts or items someone in your family constructs, Offerup is good place to list them. It gives the person the option of paying what you ask or making an offer. When it comes to selling used bicycles, the bike I purchased in Falcon , Colorado near Colorado Springs was delivered. The guy I bought it from said when I told him I wanted it that he would deliver it within two hours. He was 55 miles away in Woodland Park, Colorado. When he came he had two bikes on the back of an old car. He took the Diamondback Insight off which I had purchased and I gave him $100, he was only asking $90 but I told him that he gave such good service that I would pay him $100. I sold that bike last year for $125. The fellow that sold me the bike told me he had been buying and selling bikes full time to make a living for three years. He explained when I put in my ads that I will deliver, the sale is usually a closed deal at that point, when I arrive with the bike they give me the money. He said when people list bikes and have people come and see them the person worries about how to get a bike on their car and haggle over the price and walk away. He said it can take a long time to sell a bike that way. He said 90% of the people that call me buy a bike from me and only a small number say they do not want it when I get there.

Photography is a fun hobby for many people. I will furnish a link to an Instagram photography listing. This site allows a person to place photos on their site and people can decide if they want to purchase your photographs for commercial use. You get emails that tell you when people are looking at your photos and their comments about them. Selling access to your photos can be lucrative but it takes work to get people to notice your photos. The person can organize the photos into themes and genre to target certain people. The person can keep adding photos to their site.