If you are looking for a great way to earn extra money from home, you may want to consider learning how to buy and sell cell phones for cash. It is a great and relatively simple way to earn extra money and can be handled in a relatively short period of time each day.

A big advantage of learning how to buy and sell cell phones is that you can start with a relatively small amount of money and build it into much larger sums. My first cell phone deal was an iPhone 3G with a cracked screen that I bought for just $50.

The secret to understanding how to buy and sell cell phones for cash is to realize that cell phones do not depreciate like most typical electronics. Because of the fact that getting a great deal on a new cell phone from your carrier requires you to sign a 2 year contract, second hand cell phones retain value above the upgrade cost.

For example, you can buy a new iPhone with a contract upgrade for $199, but without a contract the same phone would cost you $599 or more. Because of this price discrepancy, a used iPhone would sell somewhere in between the $199 contract upgrade price and the $599 non contract retail price. The newer the iPhone model, the closer it will sell to the non upgrade price.

At the time of this writing the iPhone 5 has just been released. At the time of the release 16gb iPhone 5's were selling on eBay for $1500 or more because of the huge demand. They are still selling in the $750-$800 range.

But you can do just as well learning how to buy cell phones for cash on the secondary market. My 2 favorite ways to do this are by going to garage sales and asking the folks if they have any old cell phones they would like to get rid of or buy scouring through my local Craigslist ads.

Craigslist is a great resource for finding used cell phones that you can sell. If you are in a city of any decent size you can find enough phones to keep you busy just by going thru Craigslist every day. You can get a good idea of prices by doing a search of the completed listings on eBay and then try to negotiate a price lower than that that will allow you to make a profit by selling the phone on eBay.

This is exactly how I have bought nearly all of the phones I have purchased over the last 15 months since I began.

A secret that many do not realize is that broken cell phones will sell on eBay for nearly 76% of the value they would sell for intact. In fact, a great many of the cell phone deals I do are for broken smart phones that I buy locally at a discount, where there is not a huge demand for them broken, and sell nationally on eBay for a nice profit, where there is a huge pool of buyers in demand for broken phones to fix and resell.

That is my strategy for how to buy and sell cell phones for cash. You can find many bargains locally on Craigslist by scouring the ads or placing a wanted to buy ad of your own. Cell phone arbitrage is a great way to earn extra money with just a small outlay of cash.