Your cast away is someone else’s treasure – sell it on Ownai

Ever since becoming an adult, there has been one thing that my sister has continuously been fighting my mother on: Clutter! The Shona word she uses to describe it is the most fitting word for clutter I have ever heard, ‘hungwandangwanda,’ (I am sorry I cannot translate this to English). I discovered that clutter is a problem with most of us, we just can’t let go of stuff. We keep everything from high school blazers to the first bed we ever bought with our own money (first salary perhaps).

We keep these things until moth and rust (to use Biblical analogy) have destroyed them so much that we CANNOT keep them anymore, then we throw them out. This doesn’t happen in one step: at first the blazer stays on a hanger in the wardrobe, then in an unused drawer. It then gets ‘promoted’ to an ‘I still love you box’ (you know that box of keepsakes) and finally it makes its way into the garage until moth and rust take their toll.

This needs not be so hey. I remember some time ago we were moving into a smaller house and we were forced to only take ‘essentials.’ Funny how much of what we think is too important to let go is not really. We sold these non essentials we had accumulated over our lifetime and were really surprised at the amount we made. The sales took care of our moving costs with change remaining.

You don’t have to wait till you move houses before you get rid of clutter. Truth is, most of this is not clutter at all but it is stuff that someone else is looking for, yes even those vinyl records! The beauty: technology now makes it easier for you to find that person who is willing to pay money for what would eventually be destroyed by moth and rust under your watch.

Ownai is one such platform that allows you to get rid of cast offs whilst you earn money from someone who considers it to be quite the treasure. Cleaning house can pay you!

The truth is, it’s not just stuff we no longer use that we ‘need’ to sell. My cousin taught me that the best way to always have the latest cellphone or at least to have a phone that performs at the optimal level for you (whatever that is) is to regularly sell your current phone and buy a new one. This way, you sell your phone when it’s still worth a meaningful sum that goes quite the distance in offsetting the cost of the next one. This extends to anything really: TVs, beds, shoes… I have to admit, I am yet to follow advice but it sure does sound like wisdom doesn’t it?

Ownai makes it easier to do this. Advertising whatever you are selling on this platform is absolutely free. Yes there are other sites that allow you to advertise for free up to a given maximum. What if you want to do a proper spring cleaning? Limits don’t work! Ownai allows you to post as may adverts as you want.

Absolutely free on Ownai actually means free including free data. If you are an Econet subscriber, you don’t pay to access Ownai so if you want to make a quick buck because HKYA (hauna kana ye airtime: you don’t even have airtime) you can quickly create an advert to sell that childhood favourite hat, cross your fingers and hope the hat is treasure to someone with a couple of bucks.

The beauty is that the chances of the hat finding a buyer are high because potential buyers also access Ownai at no cost. We all know that there is not much internet outside the Whatsapp bundle in Zimbabwe so it helps that your buyer doesn’t need to have regular data to discover your vintage hat on Ownai.

Selling old items to buy new ones is good financial practice really although we grew up being told hurombe (being prodigal). We need to learn to let go of things whilst we can still earn from them no matter how attached we may be to these things. Ownai is there to do it easily and at zero cost – try it. Now, who has a Mukanya vinyl collection? Please post it on Ownai…