How else am I going to fund my habit man? I have bought several guitars intending to flip them and never have let go of a one.
Good point. But coming from one who has either bought or co-bought 100 guitars with the idea of flipping them at times, I never made a profit once.
However, now in the Internet age, there's a possibility to make money quickly but only very little on small quantities. I would find a buyer based on pix, and tell the person you bought it from to ship it to xxx-address without divulging you are flipping it. Get it for $450 and sell it for $550. The original owner won't care where he ships it to as long as the costs are about the same as getting it to you. If you buy it for $450 and have it shipped to you, you will have to ship it elsewhere and then you would have to sell it for $625 dollars and that's starting to get quite unlikely.
When flipping on anything, go for a reasonable 20-25% percent markup unless you have a shop. If you get greedy and want more, it will just sit there.
Take into consideration how long it takes to find a steal, and if you have it sent to you, the additional shipping costs including box and packaging. You would have to do it on some scale, maybe a guitar a week, to make enough of a profit to make GAS money. It's still easier to get another pt job or increase hours where you are working instead of the headache of bidding out for guitars and expecting to sell them. You almost have to have a small business to make it worth your time. People only think in terms of the actual dollar amount and forget about the time it takes to find an instrument and actually get a reasonable winning bid on it. There are others out there with your same goal of flipping guitars, antiques, baseball cards, etc and you can't go in halfway. There is a sweet spot without going to small like I did with a guitar every five weeks or going too big and then having to have a sizable storage place which has its own expenses.
I had a friend who initially bought quite a few bikes, working or not, and built up a serious inventory of used bikes and parts and then started to sell them for a small profit on each bike. He sold enough bikes every month to be able to quit his part time job so he could focus on school. He knew there was no going in halfway on the used bicycle business.
