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Niche cheat sheet

Phone Flipping

The method applied to phone flipping: the buy ad and five-question screening text, the sold-comps max-offer formula, the secondhand-dealer checklist, and the capital-velocity math with its stale-stock rules.

The method behind this sheet is taught once, in the free Method series — the full application lives in the Phone Flipping course.

First customers in phone flipping

The first-ten method runs backwards here: your first "customers" are sellers; make them call you instead of chasing listings. The buy ad is deliberately plain, posted morning and evening in local Facebook groups and Marketplace, reworded often because platforms flag "want to buy" posts:

"Cash paid for used phones. Any condition considered, cracked screens okay. I pay fair prices and can meet today. Text me the model and I'll quote you."

Every reply gets the five-question screening text, verbatim: "Thanks for reaching out. A few quick questions so I can quote you fairly: 1. What's the model and storage? 2. What carrier, and is it paid off or still on a plan? 3. Any cracks or damage? How's the battery health? 4. Is it signed out of your iCloud/Google account, or can you sign out when we meet? 5. What were you hoping to get for it?" Sellers who dodge the paid-off or sign-out question are telling you something; believe them. Meet at a camera-monitored police exchange zone, daylight, only the cash you plan to spend. Sell lanes: eBay and Swappa for clean phones, local cash for speed, instant buyers as the dump valve. Conversation, inspection, and paperwork are in the buying conversation.

Pricing in phone flipping

The appraisal is the five-minute sold-comps job: filter eBay to Sold Listings and Used, match model number, storage, and carrier exactly, average three comps, shade down. Then compute the number you will not exceed, from the appraisal lesson on the pricing method:

max offer = (expected sale × (1 − fee rate) − shipping − supplies) − target profit

On a $350 expected sale, no store: fees at 13.6 percent about $48, shipping and supplies about $14, target profit $70, max offer about $218. The fee bands, from the honest money: eBay 13.6 percent plus $0.40 without a store, 9.35 percent with one; Swappa 3 percent plus roughly 3 percent processing, buyer pays 3 percent on top. Plan on $50 to $90 net per clean mid-priced flip, anything better a good day. A max offer within $20 of the expected sale is too thin to survive one surprise.

Rules in phone flipping

The legal framework plus one trade-specific layer: secondhand-dealer law, a state and city patchwork written for pawn shops. Before your first buy, search your city and state plus "secondhand dealer license": some jurisdictions require registration, transaction reports, photo ID capture, or holding periods before resale (holds reported to thirty days). The bill of sale is your legal spine, IMEI, price, seller name, address, license number; no ID, no deal. Sold a stolen phone anyway: take the paperwork to the police, hand over the device, file the report, never resell it quietly. Platforms collect sales tax for you; repeat local cash selling can trigger a seller's permit; a 1099-K arrives only above $20,000 and 200 transactions, but all profit is Schedule C income either way. It is records, taxes, and stolen-phone law.

Money in phone flipping

Two formulas, drilled in capital velocity and wrapped in the money system:

flips per month = (working capital ÷ average cost per phone) × (30 ÷ average days to sell)
monthly profit = net per flip × flips per month

$400 of capital at a $200 average buy with ten-day sells turns three times a month, about $210 at $70 net. There is no fourth lever; anyone selling one is selling the old market. Budget losses at five to fifteen percent of purchases, keep the Sunday dashboard (cash, capital sitting, days-to-sale, net per flip, losses), and run the stale rules: fourteen days unsold, hard price cut to comp floor; twenty-one days, fastest lane whatever it brings; no new buys while more than two-thirds of capital sits stale. The war story behind them: one flipper sold $4,000 of unsold inventory at $3,500 and put the cash into weekly-turning phones worth $4,000 four turns later. Reinvest every dollar of profit until your working-capital ceiling.

First hire in phone flipping

The course teaches a no-employee business with no first-hire playbook; if growth takes you toward a repair shop with staff, start with the first-hire module.

Everything here is condensed from the full course, which adds the network-identity checks, the listing craft, and the first-thirty-days plan.