‘I trawl car boot sales for a living and make more than my old 9-5 job’

Do you make extra cash, either by selling your stuff or finding bargains from other people? We’d like to hear from you. Email money@telegraph.co.uk*

Becky Chorlton set up her online shop Becky’s Bazaar five years ago after, she says, the Bank of Mum and Dad “closed”.

She was studying for her Master’s degree and had been attending car boot sales for two years, where she was easily one of the youngest visitors. “There were only older people there,” she explains. “I rarely saw anyone my age.”

It’s all changed since then. Chorlton, now 27, sells items she picks up at car boot sales through online resale platforms such as Vinted and auction site Whatnot. Other young people have now realised the treasures they could find at the boot sales. “I feel like it’s cooler to do it these days,” she says.

It is perhaps little wonder that younger people are getting involved in the car boot sale scene given the rise of second-hand influencers on social media, of which Chorlton is one: she has 330,000 followers on Instagram and 441,500 on TikTok.

She makes money from content creation – showing off her hauls, mystery bag unboxings, car boot sale vlogs – as well as reselling.

Playing to her young audience, Chorlton takes a particular interest in vintage clothes, particularly Y2K fashion – popular among Gen Z, but often sold on for pennies by car booters who wore the late-1990s to early-2000s clothing the first time around.

“I’ll fill four big Ikea bags full of clothes and they’ll be £1 each,” she says, explaining she’ll then quickly ‘flip’ each item (cleaning or fixing and then selling on quickly and for a profit) and sell for £15-£20. “I tend to focus on picking stuff up cheap and then flipping it quite quickly.”

And, even though she’s there for work, Chorlton loves spending time with the regulars. “One woman, called Carol, sells at my local car boot. She’s been selling there for over 20 years. I always speak to her and sometimes she’ll say, ‘Oh, I’ve not sold anything today, I’ve not made any money’, but she just doesn’t care because she feels like it gets her out of the house. She has lots of friends there who look out for her as she’s chilling on her little deckchair.”

Unlike some regular car boot trawlers, Chorlton doesn’t take a trolley. “I feel like stallholders know that if you’ve got a trolley you know what you’re doing, so maybe they’ll charge you extra,” she says.

As it transpires, though, even an Ikea bag can identify you as something of a pro. A hobby car booter from Cambridge, who asked to remain anonymous, revealed the time a buyer approached her stall with one such bag claiming to be looking for clothes for her daughter.

“By the end she had about 30 things (from my stall): gym tops, leggings, bags, purses, jewellery,” she says, explaining that she charged the buyer just £20 for her bundle of goodies. “Then, next time we go, she’s there again, doing exactly the same thing.”

Suspicion suitably aroused, our seller roamed the car park until she spotted the buyer, on her own stall “selling the stuff she’d just bought from me for at three times the price”.

The car boot community

But Chorlton isn’t the only one waking early on weekends and trudging around fields in all weathers, sniffing out bargains from other people’s boots. According to research from MWB Solutions, between 2021 and 2024, car boot sale footfall rose by 25pc, driven, it’s thought, by cost of living pressures and a greater desire for sustainability.

The research also found that the average person selling at a car boot sale came away with £110 in profit: there is, it seems, money to be made.

For many car booters, though – whether they’re selling, buying to resell or simply sourcing second-hand to keep costs down – it is often not solely about the money.

A number of car booters talk of the thrill of finding bargains, with one person likening it to an “obsession”. Another tells of the “nostalgia” a car boot sale evokes for them, after growing up attending them with their nan.

Certainly, car boot sales offer something of a community for many people.

As well as resellers on the look-out for items they can flip, there are plenty of people who take the sales at a slightly more sedate pace: catching up with friends, having coffee, getting their steps in. “I do 9,000 steps going round twice,” says 65-year-old Shirley Cook from Buckinghamshire. “Oh, and sometimes I buy things.”

Meanwhile, Anne Marie Storey sells at car boot sales all summer long to boost her bank balance. “I’m a full-time live-in carer and receive £122 per week, which is a pittance,” she says. “So I collect things from my neighbours and grow my own plants to sell. It’s a great help for me.”

For those with an eye for turning one person’s trash into treasure, there is big money to be made.

‘If I see the profit in an old deck chair, I’m buying it’

“Phwoar, that’s a beast,” mutters car booter James Beal as he heaves a heavy metal vice up from its seller’s sun-dappled picnic blanket. Beal, filming on a bodycam for his YouTube channel, Jammy Dodger Flips, turns the tool – a Record No.34 vintage vice, apparently – around in his hands, expertly assessing both its quality and, of course, its value.

The seller wants £6 for it and, without missing a beat, Beal agrees, paying up and leaving the vice by their boot to collect later: it’s too heavy for him to cart off in the trolley he uses to carry around his finds. As he walks away, tucking his wallet back into his pocket, the sound of a cash register “kerchings” over the video and a screen grab of the vice’s eventual listing on Beal’s eBay shop pops up on the screen: sold, four days later, for £155.

Beal was just 21 when he attended his first car boot sale in 2017. New to the scene, he explains, he arrived late, missing “anything good in the field”. At the time, he wasn’t enjoying his 9-5 job as a bench joiner and, in a moment of desperation, had Googled “how to make money online?”.

It was then that he’d learnt about people “flipping” second-hand items on eBay. “That’s where the spark started,” he says.

He had a small knowledge of vintage watches, so, at that very first car boot sale, went hunting for them. He only found a couple – by his own admission he was “very uneducated on what to buy and probably missed lots of real bargains” – but he kept going back.

“My first ever decent ‘big flip’ in my eyes was a £3 Automatic Swiss watch from a car boot, which I sold for about £50 on eBay,” he says. “I saw the potential after only making £7 to £8 an hour at my 9-5. If I could get a few good “flips” like this one, then there’s my business.”

After buying watches for a few months, Beal branched out: an empty Sega Mega CD box, bought for £2 and sold for £170 on eBay; a Wilson Tennis Ball Launcher, bought for £35 and sold, again on eBay, for more than £600.

Now 29, he specialises in shoes, having quit his joinery job in 2023 to become a full-time reseller and YouTuber. “It’s crazy how much second-hand shoes can sell for,” he says. “Sometimes more than their original retail price, depending on rarity.”

Like any reseller worth his salt, though, he clocks value-added everywhere. “If I see the profit in an old deck chair sitting there in the field, I’m still buying it.” (Which is, perhaps, how he ended up lugging home a 15kg vice: it was his background in carpentry that helped him spot that particular bargain.)

And, nine years on, he no longer turns up late, often getting up at 4am on Sundays to be the first in the field. “It pays to be first,” he says. “After a few months the body clock gets used to it.”

As well as giving Beal a new career, the car boots have also given him a tight-knit network. “The majority of my mates are eBay sellers like myself that I’ve met in the field over the years,” he says. “I have a stronger bond with them than anyone else in my friendship group as we’re all in the same game.”

In a world where, too often, transactions can be, well, transactional, there is a lot to celebrate about car boot sales, in all their eccentric, esoteric glory. Perhaps most charming of all, though, is the fact that car boots are, typically, family affairs.

Chorlton, for example, goes with her mum. “No one can make a plan on a Wednesday because we have to go to the car boots,” she says, describing the experience as an opportunity for the pair to bond. “That’s our day that we have every week.”

Beal, too, brings his family along. “My three-year-old daughter Cece sits in the car boot trolley sometimes,” he says, before revealing that it’ll be a while before his newborn son – born on July 13 (a car boot day, incidentally, although Beal assures me he “missed that one”) – will join him.

“Maybe in a few years I’ll bring the little one,” he says. Still, if anyone is ready for the broken sleep and early starts of life with a tiny baby, it’s a seasoned car booter like Beal.

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