Planning Your Yard Sale Routeby Mary Ann Romans | More from this Blogger 23 May 2007 04:39 AM Be the most efficient yard sale shopper around. Use these tips to save time, energy and money on your yard sale shopping days. There is no need to run around like a chicken without its head as you search for bargains. These days, you can find yard sales advertised all over the place, from Craigs List to church bulletins. But the best place to find yard sales still tends to be in the newspapers, both large and small. Sometimes the ads are even grouped by location, making it easy to plan a good yard sale route. Here are two tricks that I use to help me plan out a good route. First, I gather all of my interesting ads and a local street map. I place dots on the locations of all of the sales. I use different colored dots for different weeks, so I can keep reusing the map. Another way to do this is by using pencil and then erasing the marks after each week. I like using the colored dots, because then I can see patterns in sales, or make notes (for example, one gentleman has a sale every month and it is always the same stuff, so I don't bother going there). Once i have all of my dots, I can plan an efficient point A to point B route. You can also use Mapquest or a GPS system to do the same thing. Another great trick that saves you from all of those little tiny scraps of paper with ads on them is pretty sneaky. This trick will save you from having to cut out all of those tiny ads or copy them over to a piece of paper. All you do is to take a piece of clear tape. Place it over the ad and press down with your nail, the eraser end of a pencil, etc. Carefully lift the tape and place it on a white piece of paper. You should have all of the information from the ad transferred to the tape! Place the ads in order of your planned route. Related Articles: Yard Sale Shopping Myth: Arriving Early Yard Sale Shopping: Is Buying Gifts Tacky? Learn more about Mary Ann Romans  Mary Ann Romans is a freelance writer, wife and mother of three children. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, the kids and a 16-pound cat. Relevantfrugal tags User Comments PatV (57) 26 May 2007 12:30 AMThat's a great idea. Also, a lot of newspapers have web sites, so you can copy and paste ads into a text editor and print them out. yardsaler (5) 18 Jan 2009 06:07 PMI found a website the other day that basically does this for you. You enter in all of the addresses which get put on a google map. You see blue lines that show you the route between the yardsales and you can reorder the route until it looks efficient. It also automatically maps your local craigslist garages sales, which is pretty handy. The best part is that this site will print the directions for you... time saver! The site is yardsaletreasuremap.com Community Tags garage sale, Tips, tag sale, yard sale Discuss this article
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