Taking Back the American Dream

My name is Roderick and I am married to a wonderful woman named Ashley. We have two beautiful children and we make our living by selling on eBay.

We were married in the fall of last year. The previous summer months I spent installing furnaces and air conditioners for an HVAC company. I rarely saw my family that summer, often coming home very late after the kids had gone to bed. I worked nearly 60 hours a week. We were behind in our bills and had a wedding to prepare for. We made it through our wedding only to have to prepare for the holidays. Anyone with children will understand that the holidays can be a financial burden. As the leaves shriveled and fell away so did the hours at the HVAC company. Ashley's work as a full time seamstress dried up as well. We had a holiday to provide for our children and family and we had reduced hours at work with no holiday pay coming to us.

Earlier that March I had found an old binder of Garbage Pail Kids That I had kept from the '80's. I logged on to Ashley's eBay account to see what they were worth. I wasn't sure if I wanted to sell them or not until I started going through them. I found them as charming as I had when I was young and decided to continue collecting them. After all, I had just found a source!

Slowly I began to buy them and then sell off the extra ones. It was just like trading them in the schoolyard, but this time real $ was involved. By the time winter had come, I was making some decent extra cash on eBay with these old stickers from the '80's.

It was enough to see us through the holidays.

As Christmas came and went, ice storms took the financial burden role. We both missed work due to power outages, snow-ins, school closings, and illnesses. These circumstances threatened to break us. We could not trust 40 hour a week jobs to provide for us. When industry is slow, employers cut hours. They give less holiday pay. They downsize. You can work for 20 years at a company and give them your all, only to have your benefits cut and wages reduced when the economy is down.

We hated feeling so helpless, so trapped in work-hell-prison with nothing to show for it.

What happened to the American Dream? Is it in the hands of Corporate America? Do they really have all of the profit? We asked ourselves how we were supposed to provide for our children in a country that raised the cost of living every 3 months yet never raised pay. We were both working 40 hours plus and we were STILL behind in all aspects of our finances.

So we decided to sell more stuff on eBay to make the money we needed. It wasn't long before we noticed that we were doing very well at it- and we loved it! Now neither of us work at traditional day jobs. We work for ourselves.

The American Dream is to make a living in this country and prosper. It is to build something with your bare hands and support yourself with your trade and skill. It is to provide something of worth to your community, to live in the land of the free. Today, Americans grow up to work 40 hour work weeks at companies that don't care if their workers prosper. They work their jobs, scrimping and saving to buy overpriced shiny things that they don't really need, just to make their work-hell-prison somewhat tolerable. They work and work only to barely see their children grow up.

We refuse to do this anymore.

We are a young couple interested in taking back the American Dream of prosperity through hard work from greedy corporations and giving it back to the American Family. We are doing it by selling on eBay. We know that others may benefit from our experience and knowledge. Here in this blog you will find out how we did it, how we make it work for us, and how we have a blast doing it.

Take back the American Dream with us!