This week we have a story of a self-made millionaire, Weale from Silver Hand-US server. With a slightly different outlook on gold making, Weale avoids the traditional markets and has made reselling his own.
If you'd like to submit your own gold making Milestone Interview, instructions & more details are on my Milestone Interviews page. Any milestone is suitable - whether it be 100k or 10 million, we want to hear about YOUR story. Don't be shy! You've seen what others are sending in over the last few months so come on - tell us how you've been doing it!
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What is your milestone amount?
1 Million total Altoholic gold.
What got you started making gold and when?
I've always had "some" gold but I never really focused on accumulating it. It was sometime around the end of the year in 2012 that I started taking "making gold" more seriously. I cleared a couple hundred thousand with a lot of effort put into crafting during the early weeks of MoP so I did have maybe 200-300k spread around on Silver Hand Horde characters when I decided I would try to "make a million."
Which markets have you concentrated on, if any?
I've made most of my gold this year by reselling. Not all but I would say maybe 60-80%. I started reselling items on a lark around the beginning of 2013, and was surprised what a decent business it was. Ultimately it became what I concentrated most on.
Biggest successes or biggest failures
Well I sold the first bar of Living Steel ever put on our AH for 20k. That was ridiculous. But the biggest success was certainly figuring out a way to resell efficiently. I keep about 1,000 auctions up and I have my search and pricing pretty smoothly automated.
In the world of failures, I avoid most "obvious" crafted items like gems, blue gear, flasks/potions etc, because they are just a lot of trouble for the amount of money they bring in. (On my server anyway.) Occasionally I will cut gems and scribe glyphs for alts and when I do, I often make a batch to sell. I also try to make desirable items from casually or cheaply collected materials -- the 553 pants, or Sky Golem/Pierre. Even if those sell at the supposed materials cost, my actual materials cost might be 1/2 that or less.
The battle pet market is terrible on my fairly small economy server. I thought it might be a good thing at first, but eventually I just wound up with 1-1/2 guild tabs of pets that I will try to sell some day if/when we get connected to other servers.
Advice for new goldmakers
If you want to resell, you need to be able to log in multiple times per day and have your mail -> AH process working smoothly. You need to be prepared to relist some/many items for months.
If you are selling crafted items, get the materials as cheaply and quickly as you can.
Don't buy ANYTHING for yourself unless it's really important. The only things I even remotely splurged on were enough battle pets to get me the collecting achievements.
If you have a bunch of level 90 alts, ALWAYS do your Lei Shen treasure runs. You can easily get 300-500 "free" gold and 2-3 spirits of harmony for your 10-15 minutes of work (go find a key, do a run). That is a lot of gold and spirits per hour.
Shout outs for any blogs or podcasts that helped you along the way
Pretty much figured it out all on my own.
What's your new goal, if any?
3-4 months ago I was sure I wouldn't make it to 1 Million by the end of the year, but I passed 1 Million in gold last week. I might make it to 1.1 Million by the end of the year. Meanwhile I have an inventory of stuff worth maybe 2 Million more, about half it listed regularly, the other half chilling out in a vault.
I think I will continue to do what I'm doing but spend some of the money I make on luxuries. I feel like after being reasonably successful this year, I've earned it!
So there we go - reselling is big business for Weale - Congratulations on your first Million gold and may it continue to pour into your bags!******************
The funny thing is that I don't usually resell stuff, especially transmog or high level armor - transmog just didn't seem to take off on my small server and I've lost touch with the high end stuff so I steer clear of it. However, for the last month, I've been doing my 30 minutes a day project and reselling is pretty much all I've been doing, albeit at the very bottom end of the markets!
Having read Weale's story, maybe I should look at it again - at the very least, it will give me something to write about and I can afford to take a risk here & there now too!
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