We have a guy in the neighborhood that purchases used bicycles fixes them up and then sells them. With the price of gas and with the economy not being so good he has really started having trouble keeping bikes around. He said that people who are on fixed income or that don’t have much money are starting to come to him more often to get bikes as their only mode of transportation. He lives in the lower income section of town so he is right in the middle of the people who are having the most trouble.

On the other hand we had one bike that we weren’t using any more, along with 2 bikes that the grandkids had outgrown and 1 bike that needed work on that we did not know how to do. So the question was what do we do? Try and sell our bikes in a garage sale? Put an ad in the paper? And then after we sold them, if we could, we would have to find other bikes that the grandkids could ride now. That would mean looking through the paper for used bikes their size or coming up with the money for new bikes both of which take time.

The solution we came up with was taking all of them [total of 4] over to his place and negotiated trading them in for 3 bikes that were usable for the grandkids to ride and was in workable order. Bartering is a good way to get rid of what you don’t need any more and getting what you do need. We ended up not paying anything in the process and we got what we needed and he got more bikes to sell.

So a couple of the take away on this is that you can trade for things that really do not need to be new, thus saving money and that you can take a skill such as working on bikes and turn it into money.