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Posted on 08/16/2026 7:25:29 AM PDT by DFG
Some people’s trash becomes Michael Haskell’s treasure.
The 18-year-old buys abandoned storage units in the New York tri-state area and sells their contents. His business, Mike’s Unique Treasures, brought in about $135,000 in 2025 from eBay and auction sales, and another $85,000 from January through mid-July, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Haskell’s entrepreneurial ventures didn’t start here. Growing up, he’d sell books for a few bucks on eBay or buy rarer Legos and hold onto them to turn a profit after they went out of production. “I never knew what I was going to be doing” career-wise, Haskell says. But “I always thought I was going to be doing something on my own.”
It’s a notion many young people share. Gen Z is contributing “disproportionately” to recent growth in business formation, according to a July report from the Bank of America Institute. In June, business application growth among Gen Z was more than double that of Millennials and Gen X. The bank’s internal data also points to founders “getting significantly younger,” the report says, noting that “with younger workers navigating a tough labor market, starting a business may be viewed as an alternative path to income growth and career advancement.”
Haskell turned to storage units partly to differentiate himself from his peers. “I was looking around and seeing everyone have a 4.0 GPA and being a little self-conscious,” he says, since he didn’t have the same. As he thought ahead to college, he says he wondered: “How was I going to be different from the crowd?”
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
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“Ever watch Storage Wars ? LOL It’s mostly junk”
and there have been several claims that most of the “good stuff” was planted ...
used office furniture offers similar, perhaps better, savings over buying new as well when setting up a business ...
new mechanics should consider some lower-level brand tools and tool chests than all new Snap-On and such when first starting out as well ...
“””I did something similar. I gave all my stocks, mutual funds, 401(k) and everything and they put it into a spreadsheet with my net worth for the day. It used Friday is close to add everything up. It took about four minutes at most. I think AI is great. I’m sad that so many are poo pooing it.”””
What happens when the Internal Revenue Service issues a subpoena to AI for all of this data that you and others have turned over to AI?
Will you and others think AI is so great then?
“But some of my favorite and most useful household things have come from thrift stores.”
our local ReStore always has several pieces of very high-quality solid-oak furniture for ridiculously low prices ...
The last 20 years of my working career were spent programming routers, switches and voice products from Cisco Systems for enterprise customers like Bank of America.
When had to produce a detailed design package for the Bank to approve before converting enterprise sites in their network, everything from switch/router configuration to IP addressing, etc.
If I had the use of a AI tool like Claude AI, the time required to put together a site design package would have been reduced by at least 50% if not more.
In that job we had to use Microsoft Excel extensively, for anyone using Excel, using Excel now with an AI tool installed as an add-on to Excel makes the product like an entirely new product where complex formulas, formatting and data correct as simple as type a simple instruction with only having basic knowledge of Excel.
I use ChatGPT as my “AI Lab Assistant” when developing C++ code for embedded microcontrollers. In addition to very useful tasks like maintaining a lab notebook that will ultimately turn into the documentation package, doing all the charts and graphs, it writes bug-free production-quality code in seconds. And often, after doing so and my confirmation that it compiles and works, the AI will offer to refactor it to improve modularity and structure. Just like a real human! (/s) Best money I’ve ever spent, and I’m told that Claude is even better at code-writing at least. But I’ll stick with ChatGPT because I like it.
I’ve seen from my own experience how much money can be made by reselling things this way. I bought a really pretty Thai tiffin (traditional lunch box) for less than ten dollars. Someone is selling it on Etsy for $75 - and it’s not even as elaborate as mine:
On the other hand, the Internet has made it much harder to find nice things at really good prices; the people who run these stores have become very savvy about searching out the real value of things or what people will pay for them in different markets. In the past, they sold things somewhat more ‘ignorantly’..
(There is a man I’ve seen in my local thrift who carries his phone and checks the going price online for everything, before he buys.).
My hat is off to him, but not the author of the article.
I don’t care if he had $1,000,000. in sales. What really matters is the margin after he takes out the cost of those goods sold.
It’s like those folks that push buying rental real estate of flip properties and they talk about cash flow rather than profit, while totally ignoring loan proceeds included in cash flow.
Sorry, after 50+ years as a CPA I spot the bullcrap.
I see so many estate sales, garage sales, storage unit auctions, etc.... one could literally decorate and equip an entire house with very good stuff, very cheaply.
If one were poor, there is no reason to buy anything new.
Yeah you need a lot of storage space just to handle the crap that you’ll be hauling out. Recycling , donating or trash will be a thing.
Not everything is rare , most will be crap , but more power to him .
The python code I’ve had Claude AI generate is relatively trivial, but for someone who doesn’t know python it is pretty amazing.
I have accounts on Polymarket and Kalshi, both with less than $100 in each, the script I had it write was to query Kalshi about the 15-minute price of Bitcoin.
Every 15 minutes Kalshi has market where you can bet if the at the end of the 15 minute period, will the price of Bitcoin be above or below the opening price for that 15 minutes, the opening price of the 15 minutes is the closing price for the previous 15 minutes, 24 hours a day this is going on.
I had Claude AI write a python script to see when the above or below price got to 75% agreement the first time in that 15-minute window, how often did the 15-minute market close in the same direction and at the end of the 15-minute period log the results into a excel spreadsheet in csv format. BTW, Claude AI also generated a readme file with the actual code and documentation of how it all worked.
In less than 15 minutes I had the script running, logging the results and it ran for 3-days without hanging up.
I've been considering something similar - how has that worked out for you? Or, are you not trading and just gathering historical/live data to see whether there might be a repeatable trading signal?
Yeah, thermodynamics and fluid mechanics for sure.
You have to watch out for those 50-gallon drums that are oozing fluids.
“some of my favorite and most useful household things have come from thrift stores.”
💯%!
“”You have to watch out for those 50-gallon drums that are oozing fluids.””
***
LOL!
Yep. Ask me how i know. And yes you can do an S corp. Choose your poison.
Using just 3 days of data, after the over/under price got to 75% agreement, the ending price for that 15-minute window closed in the same direction a little over 80% of the time, subtracting Kalshi fees your winnings would have been 1-2% at most.
The next script I have in my mind is to find markets that are the same on Kalshi and Polymarket and write a script that interrogates both markets to see if an arbitrage wager exist, a wager where you can bet both sides of the market and still win and would it be profitable enough after fees to make it interesting.
One of the models I’ve been working on is for upcoming Week 1 NFL games.
Using an API I had Claude AI write a script using the API to pull the point spread, over/under and money line current odds from 10 different sports books and update a spreadsheet, then update the spreadsheet at least 3 times per week to detect the trend of how money was being wagered.
This one took about 30 minutes to get working, I had to change a couple of settings within Claude AI which were suggested by Claude AI to make it all work.
Finally, I’ve only begun to work on this project in Claude AI, I’m thinking about starting a “faceless” YouTube channel , I don’t want to film myself reading a script so working with Claude AI to write the script I found a tool that integrates with Claude AI that allows you to record 2-3 minutes of your voice reading anything and using that recording it can clone your voice for the 15 minute script that Claude AI generated along with all the graphics I need to upload to YouTude for a working video.
The biggest trick to staying in biz with a small biz PARTICULARLY in a business UNfriendly state (ex: NYS), is to KEEP UP WITH YOUR PAPERWORK! You simply MUST do DAILY data input. This is the ONLY way to keep track of what is going on. Just passed our 10th year this July. Also we have rental property in a ultra tenant friendly area. Not easy.
My is 24 and makes over $100k. Part owner in a card shop, Buys and sells trendy stuff for pocket change.
He is doing great and has plans to expand his ventures. He is locked and loaded and has college credits because he took advanced classes in HS, before the school district went full retard DEI.
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