Frugally Purchasing New Furniture For My Condo

Recently I closed on my first home, a new construction condo. In college I lived in my fraternity house for my four years, which prevented me from buying any furniture. After graduating and moving into an apartment with a buddy, I had to purchase a mattress and box spring, but everything else was provided by my roommate. After moving into my condo, I had a lot of furniture to buy. Fortunately, my parents decided it was time to get new family room furniture, so I received a set of furniture that consisted of one leather couch, one leather chair, one leather recliner and one fabric chair. Other than my parents furniture, my mattress and box spring, a cheap computer desk and a drunken garbage picked coffee table, I had no furniture to fill out a 2 bed, 2 bath condo.

I set out on a journey to buy new furniture as frugally as possible (the down payment cost a pretty penny). Usually new furniture and frugally don’t go together, and I’m not talking about “new to me”. Most frequently frugally purchasing furniture requires craigslist, garage sales or resale stores. I was of the mind set that I wanted new furniture to match my new condo, but I did not want to pay top dollar.

One of my Mom’s favorite hobbies is to go to open houses, watch HGTV, visit resale stores and furniture stores going out of business. I had never personally been to a “going out of business” sale. One of those everything must go types of sales that you hear about on tv. There was a Bassett furniture store that was liquidating the sales room and the warehouse. Apparently they had too many Bassett stores in the same area and decided to liquidate the one closest to my parent’s house.

Buying from a high quality manufacturer going through a liquidation is how to frugally buy new furniture. Every item was drastically reduced. I found a bedroom set that consisted of a wood frame, dresser with mirror, highboy dresser and night stand for $2,400, which included tax, delivery and set-up. The original price was well over $5,000. Additionally, I found a small (which is the only size that will fit well) dining room table and four chairs for $460, marked down from $790. Finally, I bought a coffee table and two matching end tables for $156, marked down from $230. My current coffee table is being converted to a tv stand.

I am very pleased with my high quality new furniture that was purchased at severely reduced prices. Liquidation sales are a very frugal option for purchasing new furniture. Basically, the salesman has a certain number of days before the lease is up and everything has to be sold or packaged up and shipped to another store. It is much more profitable to sell the furniture rather than ship it to another store. The best part of the whole liquidation sale is that it was accompanied with a 6 month no interest, no payments financing deal. However, I would not accept a financing deal without having the funds to pay it off. If you are even a day late, the interest that would have been added during the 6 months (interest rate above 20%) is immediately charged.

The best example of how desperate the salesman are to sell the furniture is how much he kept lowering the price as we debated purchasing the furniture. Since the store was so close to my parent’s house, my Mom and I decided to walk to the store. We were planning on going home and thinking it over when it started raining extremely hard. We took a seat on a couch to wait out the storm. As we were sitting the salesman walked by and reduced the price two more times. After the second time we decided it was too good of a deal to pass up.

If you’re looking for new furniture at great prices, I recommend liquidation sales. I should be able to buy all of my furniture for well below the $7,500 first-time home buyer tax credit. Now what do I do with the remainder?