Purchasing goods using craig and his list

I originally started this blog to share some helpful money saving tips, my thoughts on being a cheapskate and also write about my day to day personal stuff.  I've hit the personal stuff pretty hard recently so it's time to be Mr. Helpful and share some pro-tips for scoring on craigslist (HEYYYYOOOOOO - Perhaps the phrasing on that is a bit misleading, though the same principals may apply).

As great as craigslist is, it has it's drawbacks.  Any free site is going to attract scammers and spammers, so that is a given.  It also really limits your search radius to what it considers your other nearby craigslists, sometimes that's helpful and others it's not.  I live in an area that is lucky enough to have it's own specific craigslist site, but that doesn't mean the "market" is so large here that I never have to search other craigslist regions depending on what I'm looking for.

Being awesome:  A case study
My leaf vacuum was a recent craigslist find, one of my best to date.  A leaf vacuum is somewhat specialized enough that you're going to have to cast a wide net to find what you're looking for.  I found this one a few hours away, corresponded with the seller over a period of time and in the end he even delivered it to me.

A few things that really worked to my benefit were:

• Motivated seller:  He no longer had any use for it after moving.
• There were some missing parts, I was able to quote the cost of replacement parts and whine about how it's not all there to negotiate a better deal.
• Early and often:  I started looking early enough so that timeline wasn't a problem.  If I had waited until now that the leaves were falling I'd have a lot more competition and would have paid a lot more.  
• Blind luck:  The seller travels a lot, and he just happens to head up my way on a weekly basis, give or take.

I ended up paying $400 for a machine that was used approximately 5 times and looked brand new, and while it was technically incomplete, $45 worth of parts was all I needed to make it, and me, whole again.  Retail on these bad boys is about $1200 and a comparable used ones, going by other craigslist ads, were in the $800+ range.  Awwwwwww yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee [muffins]!

Get by with a little help from your friends

In this wonderful technologically advanced age we live in, there are some tools to help a brotha out.  Personally I use Craigslist Search Helper (CSH), an extension for Chrome, Firefox, or Safari web browsers.  There are other options as well, but this one is my favorite so far.  It basically sits "on top" of craiglist, formats it a little differently, and adds a bunch of nice features to make navigating and searching craigslist much easier.

A lot of fish in the sea

You may need to broaden your horizons and leave your mom's basement and search a larger area.  CSH does exactly that, allowing you to put exactly how far you're willing to travel that's not limited to what craigslist considers your nearby regions.

Early bird gets the worm

CSH lets you set up search alerts to run every XX minutes/hours/days so that you can keep on top of whatever you're looking for.  Your browser needs to be open, and the alerts seem specific to the computer you have the extension installed on.  I may be missing an option to create an account and logon to that so it would work over multiple computers, but I haven't really looked for it, either.  When it finds new stuff you haven't looked at yet, it will pop up a little alert.

Zen and the art of helpful stuff

CSH makes the craigslist results more helpful by allowing you to mouseover the ads to read the text, view pictures, flag as spam, set a flag that you want to follow up with that, and even take notes all without even clicking into the ad.  

And I thought we were friends *harumpf*

The downside to all this is that CSH injects ads in it's layouts and overall it's "skin" for craiglist is not really that great to look at, but since we're all flawed in some way or other I've decided we're still going to go to prom together.

Bring forth into my RSS reader, peasant!

An alternative to CSH I've used in the past is the website crazedlist.org.  It's a bit clunky, you have to use Firefox (after making a change in the hidden browser settings), but one options is that you can save your search as a .OPML file that you can import into your RSS reader.  This was is pretty nice in that you can set it up in Google Reader, for instance and from any computer that has internet you can check to see if there are new ads.  

I find myself using the RSS method for long-term searches that I be creepin' on, and CSH on a daily basis to browse around craiglist and do my "Hmmmmm I wonder what kind of XYZs are for sale within 100 miles of her" type stuff.