CALENDAR

Speaker Identification
Speaker 1 - Announcer / Prerecorded Promo Voice. This voice delivers the opening program introduction, the repeated 1-800-JUNK-REFUND promotional spots during commercial breaks, and the closing program identification.

Speaker 2 - Alan J. Cook, Host. The opening identifies Alan J. Cook by name, and he conducts the live monologue throughout the episode from the North Bethesda / Rockville, Maryland area.

Speaker 1 - Announcer / Prerecorded Promo Voice:
Welcome to the Junk Refund Show, hosted by Alan J. Cook, founder of 1-800-JUNK-REFUND.

Have you ever paid one of those expensive junk-removal companies to take away some of your stuff, only to say to yourself as the truck drives off down the street, "Some of that stuff wasn't junk"? Did they try to sell it for you and give you some money back? No.

Well, now there is a company that can do just that. Listen to our weekly Junk Refund Show on BBS Radio TV to learn how one lady spent $375 on junk removal and got $3,200 back. 1-800-JUNK-REFUND represents the next generation of junk removal. Learn how not only to save money on junk removal, but also how to get some money coming back.

Plus, purchase one of our radio vouchers during the show to save even more on your junk removal. Let's get the junk out of your home and out of your life. Now, with your host, Alan J. Cook.

Speaker 2 - Alan J. Cook, Host:
And welcome to the Junk Refund Show, coming to you live from my place in the North Bethesda / Rockville, Maryland area, where it is outside, I'm going to guess, 94 degrees, and inside a cool 68, maybe 69, something like that.

I literally walked in the door about two minutes before my buddy Don, the producer of our show, called to get the show going. So the timing was great. I'm indoors, it's nice and cool, and I get to talk to you wonderful folks for an hour about how to get the junk out of your home and also out of your life.

That's what we do here on the world's longest-running junk-removal radio show. I'm here to tell you, I've been in this business 20 years. The junk-removal guys and gals out there, the junk-removal folks, they're not exactly lining up to do radio shows. So that's kind of cool because it gives us a niche that nobody else is really doing much, at least as far as I know. We're proud of that because it gives us something to do, sets us apart in some ways, and it's just a lot of fun.

Hat tip to the BBS Radio Network as well. They do a great job. You can listen to the show live on BBSRadio.com. I always say that's "boy, boy, scout" radio.com, and we're thrilled to be here.

If you have a question for the show about junk removal of any type, call 888-627-6008. I'm particularly interested today - and we'll talk about this later in the show - if you are involved, or have been involved, in a common-law marriage. Call me, because I would love to pick your brain a little bit and understand more about what one of those is: 888-627-6008.

Again, if you have any experience, or if you know somebody who has some experience with common-law marriages, call me. This is something new that I ran into a couple of weeks ago, and I just want to find out a little bit about it.

Okay, first, in the order that I wrote this down for the show today, I've got a couple of things here on the list that I want to talk about.

The first one is what's called a Burger King issue. You'll remember, and have probably seen, a bunch of commercials where a guy named Tom, identified in the commercials as the CEO of Burger King, is talking about how they're trying to revamp themselves and change a few things. They fired the King, and now you're the King when you go to Burger King. They're talking about the Whoppers and how they're making sure all the Whoppers are up to snuff and in great shape, et cetera.

Tom, bless his little heart, had the guts to post on TV his phone number - his cell number - and he basically invited people to call him. According to the commercial, he got 85,000 calls. His number, by the way, as it flashed on the screen, is 305-874-0520. I copied it. I had to see the commercial a couple of times to get all the digits because they don't flash it up there very long, but that is the number that flashed up on the screen.

Because this is a junk-removal radio show, this falls under the column of how to get some of the junk out of your business. I wrote down here, "the Burger King issue."

You know that you'll go to McDonald's or Wendy's or some of these places, buy a meal, and they give you the receipt. On the receipt it says, "Take our little survey and we'll send you a code to give you a free Big Mac," right? That's the idea.

I happened to look at my Burger King receipt recently. I'm not a Whopper guy who goes in there and says, "Hey, give me six Whoppers." I go in and get the original chicken sandwich, number eight, with onion rings. They used to serve actual slices of apple pie, which I always enjoyed. They stopped doing that, but I think their chicken sandwich is their best sandwich. It's kind of shaped like a rectangle with rounded corners. The bun is shaped that way, and it's really good.

I bought one of those lunches and happened to look at the receipt. I'm going by memory here because I don't have one in front of me. I tried to see if I had kept it so I could read it to you. But the receipt says, essentially, take our survey online and we'll give you a free Whopper - just buy a small drink and a small fry at the same time.

I'm going, "Then that's not a free Whopper." You're not giving me a free Whopper. You're giving me a Whopper if I give you more money and buy, I think it may have even said any size, but at least a small drink and fries. What's that, five bucks maybe between the two of them? Then you get a "free" Whopper.

Well, I'm sorry, Tom, with all due respect, but the Whopper isn't free if that's what you're doing. The Whopper is available without an additional charge for the sandwich, so maybe that's why you're calling it a free Whopper, but I have to give you five dollars more first, plus give you my time to fill out your survey.

The word "stupid" is not aimed at Burger King. I just think all these surveys where companies ask their customers to take their time to fill something out can become a problem when, in this case, you don't actually get anything for free. You have to buy a small fry and at least a small soda, and then they'll give you a Whopper. Well, that's baloney. That's backwards.

I'm going to call Tom or text him on his cell phone and mention this, with a photo of the receipt, and say, "Look, if you're giving away a free Whopper, take away the fry and drink requirement because it's not free. It comes with a price." Nobody likes to feel taken advantage of. Nobody likes to be a sitting duck or a captive audience where you think something's going to happen and, lo and behold, it doesn't.

I did some work for an older guy one time who lived across the street from a really nice public golf course in Montgomery County, Maryland. He said, "Hey, we're doing a big blood drive this afternoon. If you go over and give blood, they'll give you a free round of golf at this prestigious golf club."

I trusted the guy. At lunchtime, I went across the street. They strapped me in. I gave a pint of blood or something like that. They gave me some cookies, crackers, and lemonade on the way out. Then they gave me a little certificate that said, "Come to the golf course with three paying customers and we'll give you a round of golf for free."

So now what they're doing is using me to get more paying customers to come to their golf course, and if I round up three guys who are going to pay, they'll let me play for free. You think I'm going to do that to my friends? No, I'm not. So don't call it a free round of golf when it's not.

If you have issues about Burger King - and we're talking about how to get the junk out of your business here - call or text Tom, the CEO, at the number shown on the TV screen, 305-874-0520. They've given that number out nationwide. Give him your thoughts about how to make Burger King a better place.

I will mention Qdoba. I love to go to Qdoba because they say if you take our survey - and the survey is not very long; that's critical - we'll give you free chips and salsa. It's got to be a quick survey.

I've done that half a dozen times. As soon as I'm done online answering their survey, whammo, I get an email with the code, and it also shows up on my phone in my Qdoba account. When I go in there the next time, it says, "Oh, you have free chips and salsa." That's the way to do it.

Don't require me to buy something, or your issue for a "free Whopper" is not really that, and your credibility drops. The exact opposite of what Tom is trying to accomplish is to raise your credibility, but it drops when you tell me it's a free Whopper and then I have to pay money to get it.

Okay, that's point number one of 15 that I have written down for today. Here we go.

Number two: learn something from a guy named Leonard. Leonard is a really good guy who, over the years, has called me to pick up scrap metal from what turns out to be his deceased brother's home. The family is trying to get the home ready for sale.

Leonard, bless his heart, is over there as a one-man show trying to get this home ready for sale, and every day that goes by, Leonard falls another day behind. I'm mentioning this not to attack Leonard, but to say: step back and be aware of the big picture.

What Leonard is trying to do is go through everything in the house, find the documents that need to be found, sort things out, and then, when he ends up with a pickup-truck load of metal for us to remove, he calls me. I go over, we pick it up, and haul it away. That's fine.

But at the pace he's going, it's going to take him six or seven years to get this house ready to be shown for sale, and the Realtor wants it done in the next month. Leonard believes that he and a high-school kid and a dumpster can clear this house out, no problem. I'm here to tell you, there's no high-school kid in the world who's going to continue running stuff out the back door, up the hill, around the front, throwing it in the dumpster, coming back, and doing that day after day after day.

With all due respect to the high-school kid, that's going to wear the kid out. Leonard is of an age where he's not going to be a lot of help getting everything out either.

He took me in there and said, "I want to ask you about these file cabinets." There are probably a dozen metal file cabinets in the basement, back in the middle of the house. You have to walk through one area, down a hallway, and through a door to get to them. None of those file cabinets can be brought out because there's too much stuff in the hallways leading to where the file cabinets are.

It's nice that you're worried about the file cabinets, but you've got to get rid of all the stuff in the hallways that lead to the file cabinets before we can help you get the file cabinets out.

Even if you hired a junk-removal company with two or three guys to go in there full-time, it's going to take at least a week to clean this place out and probably more like 10 days. It's a three-level home. His brother was a hoarder. There's all kinds of stuff in the house, and I'm telling you, one guy - Superman - with one teenager and a dumpster couldn't get this done fast enough.

I mention this story not to attack Leonard, because bless his heart, he's just trying to do his best to help his deceased brother's estate get taken care of. But Leonard doesn't realize that he is the bottleneck in the process now. You have to get Leonard out of the way in order to make progress, because every day that goes by, Leonard falls farther and farther behind.

So, bless his heart, Leonard is not helping with the junk removal; Leonard is making it more difficult. If you tell that to Leonard, he'll probably get ticked off, but that's my assessment.

Don't be the Leonard. If somebody passes away, somebody has to downsize, somebody gets divorced, and you're the person in the best position to get the stuff out of the house, recognize the big picture. You don't have time to go in there and find every little document that somebody has brought into this home over the last 40 years and then try to figure out what to do with every single thing. It'll take you a year just to go through and find all the documents.

Don't be the bottleneck in your family's process of trying to get a home sold. Let the pros, like 1-800-JUNK-REFUND or any of the other companies, come in and do their thing and get the stuff out of there. In our case, sell the good stuff or donate it or do something with it - not just throw it in a dumpster. But don't be the bottleneck that causes the slowdown.

For those of you who are soccer fans, issue number three: how to get the junk off your soccer team.

Far be it from me, by the way, to be a credible critic of soccer as a sport, the people who play it, or the coaches who coach it. I'm one of these guys who likes to play golf and likes to watch golf. I'm a tennis player and I like to watch tennis. Some people couldn't be paid to watch golf because it's too boring for them.

Well, up until the World Cup this year, you couldn't really pay me to watch soccer either. It was just too boring, especially when the offensive team starts kicking the ball backward toward its own goalie so, I guess, they can reset and start over again.

Can you imagine in an NBA game if LeBron James brought the ball into the forecourt and then turned around and dribbled back to the opposite end of the court, turned around, looked at the defensive setup at the far end, and then started to slowly walk it back up toward his basket where he's trying to score? You see the point. I didn't really like that. I'm going, "Why are they doing this?"

But here's what happened. I said to myself, you know, in Azteca Stadium in Mexico City, where they've played some of these World Cup matches, that stadium, I think, holds 120,000 people, something like that. I'm saying to myself, "120,000 Mexicans can't be wrong." I mean, sorry, but there's a reason why they pay to go to that stadium.

I Googled how many goals are scored in a typical World Cup soccer match. The answer I found was 2.8. How long is the match? At least 90 minutes. So you're going to see one goal scored every half hour, right? That's like watching Everybody Loves Raymond and getting one joke every half hour or something. You know what I mean? To me, that's kind of boring.

But it is the world's most popular sport. The World Cup is the world's most popular soccer tournament. There's got to be something here that I'm missing. So I started to watch. I watched complete matches. The penalty-kicks thing is always a blast; that gets exciting. I tried to understand more about what's going on and what they're trying to do.

What I started to realize is how fast that soccer ball moves, especially down around the goal when you're trying to score. I also realized how good those players have to be to know, should I do a header? Should I bounce it off my chest? Should I kick it with my foot? Should I be upside down when I kick it with my foot?

That ball really is moving quickly when they're trying to score, and I love the concept that you seem to know right where your teammates are all the time. That's an amazing thing.

As a tennis player, if you play singles, you only need to know where you are and where your opponent is. If you play doubles, there are only two of you on your side that you have to keep an eye on, plus the guys on the other side of the net. But when you're playing soccer with 11 guys on one team and 11 on the other team, you've got to be pretty good to know where to kick that ball so your teammate can score or be in position.

I'm really impressed with the teamwork that goes on. I'm going to tell you more about that. We're going to take our first break here for a minute and come back on the Junk Refund Show.

I'm going to tell you what I thought of the U.S. men's national team's performance in the game where they got eliminated, and talk a little bit more about soccer. That takes us to item number three out of 15, so I'm going to have to hurry up, but we're okay.

I'll see you back here in about a minute. I'm Alan Cook, the host of the Junk Refund Show. You're listening to us live on the BBS Radio Network, the world's longest-running junk-removal radio show. We'll be back in just a minute.

Speaker 1 - Announcer / Prerecorded Promo Voice:
Have you ever hired one of those expensive junk-removal companies, then wondered what they did with the stuff - especially the good stuff?

At 1-800-JUNK-REFUND, we junk the junk, recycle stuff like metal and wire, donate items and get you receipts, and put the good stuff up for sale. If it sells, you get some money back.

Cynthia paid $375 for junk removal and got $3,200 back. Would you like to know how she did it?

Tune in to the Junk Refund Show with your host, Alan J. Cook, every Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern Time to get the junk not only out of your home, but also out of your life.

Speaker 2 - Alan J. Cook, Host:
Hey, folks, welcome back to the Junk Refund Show. I'm your host, Alan Cook, coming to you from Rockville, Maryland, in the cool inside of my place here, which is 68 degrees. Outside is like 143. No, it's like 92 or something outside right now. So this feels great.

I get to come in and talk to what I think is 49 nations through this network and around the U.S. about how to get the junk out of your home and also out of your life, which brings me to the U.S. men's national team.

I had blessed them for the victories they got in the early rounds. When they got to the round of, I don't know, 16 or something - I don't even remember who they were playing right now. Belgium, maybe? I don't remember. But they lost 4-1, and the thing that was amazing to me is that there just seemed to be no intensity on the part of the U.S. team.

They would get to what I assume is called midfield, right? Four of them are out there kicking the ball back and forth among themselves at midfield for minute after minute after minute. They're down - at the time they were down two goals - and it was like there was no urgency.

They'd take a shot at the coach, and he's sitting back in his chair. I'm going, "Where's the coach who's up on the sideline yelling at the players to do something different? Where's the coach who substitutes four new midfielders so somebody, at least, is trying to attack and score?"

Belgium, if it was Belgium - I think it was - they're sitting back looking at the clock tick away going, "Man, this is easy." I'm going, "You guys are playing in Seattle, Washington, on U.S. soil. Why in the world aren't you trying to win this by being aggressive?"

I get it. I'm a real novice soccer fan, so far be it from me to know how to critique this. But I do have my own opinion, and my opinion is you need a coach who fires this team up and has some passion on the sidelines. This guy just sits back in the chair and watches. Maybe he's counting or double-checking his bank account every other minute. I don't know anything about him. I heard he was a pretty good guy they brought in and a lot of money was spent.

But, for heaven's sake, on your home soil, try to win, boys. That was an embarrassment to sit here and watch this happen while the clock ticks away and you're just passing the ball around at midfield.

I don't remember the stats for how many shots on goal we had, but it was nowhere close to the other team, and we ended up losing 4-1. I was disappointed. I was disappointed in the coach. I was disappointed in the players. I was disappointed in the lack of intensity. I was embarrassed as an American that those are our best professional soccer players out there and it looks like they're not trying to win.

I'm sure there's more to the story than what I see because I'm the rookie here, not the veteran. But I'm telling you, that bugged me. I want to see at least somebody passing the ball down toward the goal to try to get something started and try to score. Why are you out on the field if you're not trying to score? I don't understand.

If you're a soccer aficionado, feel free to call in the show and educate me. I'd be happy to take your call: 888-627-6008.

Anyway, that was my take on the U.S. national men's team, who are, yes, you guessed it, out of the World Cup, and the finals are being played on our home turf, right?

All right, let me bring you to another issue, number four: scrap-metal pricing. I just want to make sure you understand where the value is in scrap metal, because you'll have scrap metal around your home, on a job site, or at work that you might be able to get your hands on. Take it to your local metal-recycling yard and they will buy it from you.

The scrap-metal dealers will buy this from you. The county dumps will not. They will just let you dump it, usually for free. But I want you to understand the difference in the pricing of the different metals that are out there.

In Montgomery County, Maryland, if we take some steel - just regular steel or regular metal - you can take a little magnet, stick it next to the metal, and if the magnet sticks, that's the lower-value type of material I'm talking about. If you put a magnet up to brass, copper, aluminum, or stainless steel, the magnet generally will not stick. Those metals are worth more.

Let me give you the range from the bottom going up. Steel, in Montgomery County, they pay about six cents a pound. So I've got to go in there with a thousand pounds of metal in order to make $60.

Cast iron, they'll pay about 10 cents a pound. You know the cast-iron tubs you see in some of these old homes, or some of those big sewage and drainage pipes that are really heavy because of the thick metal? Those are cast iron. They'll pay about 10 cents a pound.

Stainless steel - the stuff you'll see in kitchens, cookware, and restaurant equipment - about 20 cents a pound.

Aluminum, like the aluminum frames on bicycles, the aluminum edges of screens and screen doors, some doors, some golf clubs, and parts of little handheld cordless drills - all that kind of stuff that's called "dirty aluminum" - you'll get about 23 cents a pound. That's now about four times what you'll get paid for steel.

If the aluminum is clean, that's different. We have a customer called Closet America that goes around and redoes closets in the Mid-Atlantic area. They're constantly cutting steel rods and clean aluminum rods for customization used in the closets their crews remodel. We go by about once a week and pick up big buckets or trash cans of metal strips and aluminum strips.

The metal strips bring about six cents a pound. The clean aluminum strips, where it is pure clean aluminum with no other metal mixed in, bring about 46 cents a pound. You're now getting almost eight times as much money for a pound of clean aluminum as you get for steel.

Extension cords: I can't remember for sure what they pay for extension cords. I should know because I do a lot of this. But if we go to the scrapyard and have an iron or another appliance with a cord, we cut off the cord because the cord has copper wire in it and we're going to get paid more for it. I don't remember whether it's 20 cents a pound or 60 or 70 cents a pound, but it's worth separating.

Clean wire, like when you go into a commercial building where they've done remodeling and bought too much wire, and they have rolls and rolls of thick insulated copper wire they've never touched, that stuff is more like gold. That's a couple of dollars a pound for that wire. So keep an eye out for clean wire.

Brass: a lot of lamps are made of brass. A lot of knobs on dressers and other things are made of brass. Brass, you get about $1.20 a pound. That is 20 times what they'll pay you for steel.

Then you have air-conditioning units with radiator-type apparatus or screens inside them. If you end up with one of these radiators, a window air conditioner, or some kind of cooling system for a home, it's worth taking apart because inside you have copper wire. You have a condenser-type unit that is very heavy, which I think gets you about 20 or 25 cents a pound. The copper wire and copper tubing may get you about four dollars a pound.

Then they have this radiator-screening stuff. It looks like the radiator from a car and is fairly easy to take off. You get these in window air-conditioning units and heating-and-cooling systems. You can remove those with a cordless drill pretty quickly. Those things can get you a couple of dollars a pound.

If you're lucky and get your hands on clean copper tubing or copper pipe, right now it's about five dollars a pound for that copper.

I met a guy the other day in the scrap-metal yard. I went in there with a 16-foot stake-body truck. He went in there with a child's stroller and a medium-sized piece of luggage. In the luggage he had copper pipes, all cut up, and in the stroller he had more copper and copper wire in bags.

I turned in the metal from my big truck and probably came out with, let's say, $100. He went in with the stroller and the medium-sized suitcase and got $330 because it was all copper.

Just so you know, things are not all valued the same. That's not the greatest statement anybody has ever made, but it's true. If you're looking for a way to make some extra money, or you're dealing with metal and wire, be aware of where the value is in these different types of metals.

Get a little magnet and stick it on the different types of metal. If it sticks to the metal, that's generally going to be the lower-priced ferrous material. If it doesn't stick, that's a good sign because it may be worth more. You can run it in there and make some money. You don't have to have a big truck. You can walk in with a bucket with some copper or brass in it. You'd be surprised how much money you can make - cash out the door right then.

Speaking of cash, I'm now at number five. This is the most recent thing I did just before this radio show: I sold four BMW tires on rims for $280.

Let me tell you what I learned. I originally had them priced at $1,500 because I went online to see what BMW tires are selling for. What I didn't know until this buyer came by and showed me is that on each tire there's a little code that tells you when it was made.

He showed me an example like 04/16 and explained how to interpret the manufacturing date. These tires I had were marked 07/04. By his interpretation, they were about 20 years old. They still had some tread on them, but the guy was quick to point out, "These suckers are old." I went, "Okay, I didn't know that. I didn't know that's how you looked at it."

He was very careful to ask me, "Are they all the same size tire?" I assumed they were, but I hadn't really checked. I checked and found out that the two that go on the back of a BMW - I think it's the back, maybe it's the front, but I think it's the back - are slightly wider than the other two, at least with this guy's car. Everything else matched in radius and other respects, but there was a slight difference in width.

He said, "Okay, I'm on my way." They were listed for $1,500, but they are tires that are about 20 years old. There's still some good tread on them, but you're probably not going to put those tires back on the road long-term, and he's going to have to buy four more tires anyway.

He may have walked out with the deal of the century, but I don't think so. I think, all things considered, he gave me $280 cash, he got four old tires and rims, and everybody wins. The person who had me haul away the tires gets a $98 refund. That's how you make money with our company, 1-800-JUNK-REFUND. You pay us to haul the stuff away, and you get a refund coming back if we sell some of your stuff.

The interesting thing about this case is that there were four tires on their rims, and the rims were scratched up. They'd been sitting in a lady's garage for about 20 years. They were not the cleanest, brightest tires that you're going to put on a showroom car. They needed some TLC.

They had been sitting for probably two months stacked up in the back of my truck. As I'm driving around from job to job, here are four tires. Every once in a while they tip over, they fall over in the truck, and I put them back up again. I've been dealing with these things for two months.

It took me six weeks before I even put them up for sale. Shame on me. But I finally put them up for sale about a week ago, maybe 10 days ago. I listed them for $1,500, didn't really get much interest at that price, and was going to drop it to $1,000. Then a guy called me. He sounded like he knew what he was doing with tires, and I think he does.

So I sold them for about $300 - actually $280 - and I'm very happy about it. I ran that money down to the bank.

I can go out in 94-degree weather, load up a pickup truck of junk, and get paid $200 for that, or I can sit in my air-conditioned truck, have some guy drive here from D.C. for half an hour, look at the tires, put them in the back of his car, and get $280. There's the value of selling the stuff.

I did that just before I came in to do this radio show, ran the money down to the bank, and I was thrilled. That's the value of a statement I came up with: "Not all junk is junk."

Every other company I know of might have taken those tires and thrown them somewhere or discarded them. We put them up for sale because somebody could use them. Sure enough, somebody used them.

We've sold sets of tires for $1,500 before where people drove to Maryland from Ohio just to get the set of tires. I think they were tires from a Tesla that we sold. There are all kinds of good things that happen that way, and we just had it happen today, an hour ago, when I sold some BMW tires.

I put down number six: gas at 7-Eleven. If you want to get a good deal on gas - and I'm buying diesel fuel right now - 7-Eleven has had the best price, less than five dollars a gallon. Because I'm a rewards member at 7-Eleven and I punch in my phone number whenever I buy a muffin and orange juice in the morning or something, I have about 47,000 points at 7-Eleven right now.

When I show that I'm a rewards member, they give me another seven cents a gallon off. So fuel at 7-Eleven is a pretty good deal right now.

They had another promotion going through - let's see, I think it's over because it's past July 11 - where you could send a text and get 50 cents a gallon off on the seventh and the 11th of the month, which I thought was really cool.

All right, I'm up to number seven. I'm halfway through the show and two-thirds of the way through our time, but I'm making up ground here.

We're going to take another break. You're listening to the Junk Refund Show on the BBS Radio Network, where we're talking about how to get the junk out of your home and also how to get it out of your life. I'm your host, Alan Cook, coming to you from 94-degree Rockville, Maryland. We'll be back in just a minute.

Speaker 1 - Announcer / Prerecorded Promo Voice:
Have you ever hired one of those expensive junk-removal companies, then wondered what they did with the stuff - especially the good stuff?

At 1-800-JUNK-REFUND, we junk the junk, recycle stuff like metal and wire, donate items and get you receipts, and put the good stuff up for sale. If it sells, you get some money back.

Cynthia paid $375 for junk removal and got $3,200 back. Would you like to know how she did it?

Tune in to the Junk Refund Show with your host, Alan J. Cook, every Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern Time to get the junk not only out of your home, but also out of your life.

Speaker 2 - Alan J. Cook, Host:
Hey, welcome back to the Junk Refund Show. I'm your host, Alan Cook, coming to you from Rockville, Maryland, every Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern on the world's longest-running junk-removal radio show, where we try to teach you not only how to get the junk out of your home and garage, but also out of your life.

Item number seven: God bless our President, Donald Trump, but here we go. I wrote down here, he made a statement the other day. Sometimes he just kind of shoots from the hip and acts like he knows everything.

Before you pile criticism on me, I voted for the guy, okay? I'm not a Trump fanatic. I just liked him over Kamala, so I voted for Trump. But he doesn't know what the future price of gas is going to be.

He was talking about it the other day and made the statement that pretty soon you'll see gas at the pumps for $2.50 a gallon. No, you won't. I mean, I don't know what it's going to be either, but I'd bet my life it's not going to drop that low. It's going up right now.

A President of the United States doesn't know the future price of gas. Sorry. Nobody knows the future price of gas or any other commodity, or a stock, or whatever. I was a stockbroker for 10 years. I know a little bit about commodities markets and stock prices. Nobody knows what the future price of something is going to be. They might think they do, but they don't, and that includes the President of the United States.

If the President steps up and says, "Pretty soon gas is going to be around $2.50 a gallon," and everybody cheers, I'm sorry, but if you're cheering, you're naive. Love you, but you're naive.

And the statement that he knows more about the tractors made at John Deere than the John Deere employees - no, you don't. With all due respect, Mr. President, you don't. Stop acting like you do, because your credibility drops every time you shoot your mouth off with one of these predictions that you think you know what's going on. Frankly, you don't. Nobody does.

Anyway, I had to mention that one real quick.

Another sale is number eight. We've had some fun with small tool sets that we've sold for as little as $25. These are like 32 open-end wrenches in one plastic container that we got from a job we did in Hagerstown, Maryland.

We've sold some of these things and it's worked out great: $25 here, $30 there, $50 here, and pretty soon it adds up. Instead of throwing them away, like a lot of other companies would have thrown them in the dump or taken them home or whatever, we try to make some money out of it.

Number nine: I wrote down Johnny's example. Last night I took a Craftsman riding lawn mower over to a guy named Johnny on what sounds like Seneca Road in Darnestown, Maryland, because he wanted to buy it.

This is a pretty good story. This riding lawn mower was given to us by a Realtor who has referred us to lots of his clients over the years. The Realtor had it serviced a couple of years ago. Then it sat in his shed. He doesn't like to get out and mow the grass; he pays someone else to mow the grass. So the lawn mower was sitting there, not getting used.

He paid us some money to haul it away. I took it over to a guy whose number I got off his truck when he was sitting in a Wendy's drive-through line. I drove past him and noticed that he did small-engine repair, so I took it over to him to have him check it out.

The Realtor said, "It's been sitting for a while. It's not starting. I don't know what the problem is." The small-engine repair guy got it started. He said something about the top of the engine - the part that rotates when you start it. He told me, "Go get a new battery for it and I think you'll be all right."

I spent $100 having him analyze the lawn mower, and I spent $90 on a new battery. I put the new battery in, pushed the clutch down, turned the key and, whammo, it fired right up.

I listed it for sale after looking online and seeing used mowers of that brand listed around $1,000. I listed it for about $1,200. No takers. I eventually dropped it. At one point I had it at $1,000, and a guy came in and offered me $600. That was Johnny.

I went, "Well, okay. I've spent about $200 on it. I'll make a $400 profit. That's not bad. I'll do that."

I loaded the tractor up last night and drove it about 10 minutes away. We offloaded it at about 8 p.m., in the dark. Johnny hopped on, put his foot on the clutch, turned the key, and it was stuck. It wouldn't start.

We figured out how to get it started, but there is a thing called a cam - a camshaft - which is a critical part of the engine. This cam in the little riding lawn mower was apparently sticking. We eventually got it started, but there's a chance that if that cam were to permanently stick, basically the engine would be in serious trouble.

Johnny had a couple of options. His first option could have been, "Hey, it's not starting. You idiot, why didn't you start it before you brought it?" And I would have had to say, "I'm sorry. I didn't stop to start it before I brought it, but I did start it about a month ago. It has a brand-new battery. I thought it was going to fire right up."

But he didn't say that. What he said was, essentially, "I hate to see you come all the way out here and not get anything, but the problem is it has an issue."

We called the guy who had analyzed it, and he explained that it was probably a camshaft issue and described how to fix it.

The bottom line is Johnny gave me $200 for the tractor and inherited what the repairman said would typically be about a $400 repair, which Johnny is going to try to do himself. I got it off my truck and at least went back to my storage unit with some cash. I could have gone back with the tractor and wasted all my time.

I was impressed with how Johnny handled this. He was as concerned about me and my time as he was about himself and his purchase of a tractor.

Johnny is a landscaping, cement, handyman kind of guy. He'll fix this up, I think. For $200, it's worth it to him to get a tractor he can play around with and try to repair. If that thing runs for a while, then he's got a good deal. If he has to pay $400 more to fix it, then he has basically got a $600 tractor that's worth about $600, and it's going to go down in value as he uses it.

I was so impressed with Johnny's example, because he was as concerned about my well-being in this deal as he was about his own. That's a rarity. That's the old Stephen Covey "think win-win" idea, and Johnny did it perfectly.

I loved the way it worked out. I could have gone home with nothing and wasted an hour and a half of time. Instead, I came back with $200, got rid of a lawn mower, and emptied part of my storage unit. That all worked, so I thought that was great.

All right, I'm on number 10. I've got five more to do in about 11 or 12 minutes.

Common-law marriage. I've got to tell you, I was involved in a situation recently with somebody who, after knowing them for a few months, I learned had been involved in what they described as a common-law marriage for about 20 years.

Those of you in the dating world, like I am - and I've been a veteran of about 13 years in this game - I didn't really know much about these. Let me tell you what I learned. This section of the show comes under the heading of how to get the junk out of your relationships.

From what I've learned, there are about 15 states in the United States, plus the District of Columbia, that recognize some form of common-law marriage. A common-law marriage, as I understand it, is where you don't have a ceremony, you don't get a marriage license, you don't have a pastor or bishop pronouncing you married, and you don't invite anybody to a wedding. There is no traditional wedding.

Two people get together and hold themselves out as husband and wife, call each other husband and wife, and live as a married couple without going through a conventional wedding process.

What I didn't realize is that, depending on the law that applies, ending that recognized marriage may require an official divorce proceeding, just like a regular marriage.

So if you end up dating somebody and find out two or three months in that they had a common-law marriage, guess what? According to what I was told, they may still be married if they haven't gone through a divorce. Welcome to my world, folks.

Here I am really excited about somebody who's a really cool person - and still is - but lo and behold, from everything I can tell, they're still married. Well, sorry, I can't date you. I mean, I guess I could, but I don't want to. You're still married.

So come back to me with an official signed decree of divorce from a local judge, and then I'll take you out to dinner. Until then, sorry, we've got a problem.

This was a new one. I didn't know much about common-law marriages. I'm passing it along to you in case you happen to be dating somebody and the words "common-law marriage" show up. Do your homework and look it up. Everything I could tell from talking to a couple of family-law attorneys was that this person's legal status needed to be resolved through the proper process. Those are just words of wisdom from somebody who learned it in a way I wasn't expecting.

I want to talk to you about a thing called councils. This was a church-council thing that we did last night. Sometimes in different churches - in our church for sure, and I'm sure in other churches - and this applies also to PTA meetings and other meetings where you have a small group of people coming together to discuss a concern, the most important thing you can do is share your concern.

Do that even if the bulk of the people in the room are not going to agree with you. Do it even if you think you're adding disruption to the meeting instead of calm.

The purpose of telling what you think in a meeting like this is to give the decision-makers your input. If your input disagrees with the direction they're going, I'm here to tell you, they still need to get your input.

Don't worry that you're not being a team player. The worst thing you can do is go into a meeting like this and keep your mouth shut if you disagree with what's going on. Have the guts to say what's on your mind and make your point known.

I was in a church meeting last night where this happened. The guy who was bringing up his concern kept apologizing for raising an issue that might rub somebody the wrong way. The guy directing the meeting said, "Hey, you're not doing anything wrong. In fact, this is a perfect example of what you should do in a meeting. When you have a concern about something, you should raise that concern and tell people what you think. Then people can talk about it as a group, discuss it, and come to some kind of decision about what to do."

Bless his heart, he did that and he did a great job. The end result is that we were able to solve a problem that existed in his organization within our church. We came up with ideas about how to solve the problem, and everybody was blessed as a result of him bringing up the issue.

One way to get the junk out of your mind is to say something and put it on the table about an issue that's bothering you. Then you can go from there. Everybody is off and running again, and that's what happened last night.

Number 12: a weight set. I did a job yesterday - by the way, it's 97 degrees right now in Rockville, Maryland. I said 94; it's hotter than that.

I did a job yesterday by myself a few miles from here. I went up to an eighth-floor apartment. Thank heavens, when you come out of the freight elevator, which was locked and reserved for us, the guy's apartment was right there next to the elevator. That's always nice compared with those jobs where it's down at the end of a long hallway.

I hauled away about three pickup-truck loads of stuff. One of the things we hauled away was a weight set with a weight bench and about 400 pounds of dead weight: the barbell, weights, weight bar, and all that stuff.

I did the job by myself, which kind of surprised the guy, but it wasn't so bad. It actually worked out pretty well.

He had scheduled one of the big companies in the United States, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, to come do it yesterday at 10 o'clock because he wasn't sure whether he would hear back from us after he called. He had scheduled the other guys.

From a pricing standpoint, we were probably 25 to 30 percent, maybe even more, below this big company, which is a great company, by the way. So he canceled them and had us come in. I love it when that happens because people are going to save money.

That's the first thing: it pays to shop around. If you've got some of these big junk-removal companies coming in, I'm here to tell you, you may be getting charged a premium. With all due respect - they're great companies - be careful, because there can be expensive charges from some of these big companies.

The good news is, we've got somebody tonight who it looks like is going to buy the weight set for a couple hundred bucks.

We ended up hauling this stuff out for $700. The client thought it was going to be at least $1,000. I think he may have been charged $1,200 or $1,300 by the larger company. We saved the guy approximately $500 by switching the appointment from them to us. I love it when people do that.

Now we put his weight set up for sale, and we've got an offer of $200 for the weight set. If that goes through and gets picked up tonight, he'll end up getting about $70 back from the sale, which knocks his cost down further.

Show me another junk-removal company that will save you money on the junk removal, then be smart enough to take the good weight set, put it up for sale, sell it within 24 hours, and give you money back from the sale, reducing your cost of the job.

They could sell it and never tell you what they did with it. They could take it to a scrap-metal yard, throw it all away, and get 20 or 30 bucks for it. But in this case, if this sale goes through and the buyer actually shows up, this guy will end up getting about $70 - 35 percent of the sales price - back within roughly 24 hours of paying us to haul it away.

That's what sets us apart.

I've got three more things. Oh, and the 1-800-GOT-JUNK? job was number 15, so I only have two more to come up with.

All of us pretty much hate to step on a weight scale because we don't want the bad news that we're heavier than we thought.

I had not stepped on a weight scale in a long time. I went to my 50-year high-school reunion last month. I was the emcee of the dinner program for about an hour. We had name tags for everybody, plus their high-school pictures.

Without exception, at that event, when someone came up, said hi, and called me by my first name, I said hi and then immediately looked at their name tag to figure out who I was talking to because I didn't recognize a lot of people. But people were calling me by my name from 10 feet away and asking, "How are you?" So I felt pretty good that people could still recognize me when I couldn't recognize a lot of my classmates.

They took a picture of me next to my best friend from ninth grade, who has probably put on a significant amount of weight since then and is a shorter guy. I'm not interested in exaggerating, but he didn't look the same. They sent me the photo, and standing next to him I looked like a tall, thin guy. Well, that makes you feel good, right?

Then, two or three weeks later - this was last Sunday in church - a friend took a picture of me standing next to a guy who had spoken in church. The guy who spoke is a skinny, medium-sized guy, and standing next to him I looked like I'd put on 30 pounds. That bugged me.

When I go into the scrap-metal yard, they have little scales in the back where you can just hop on the scale and instantly it'll tell you what you weigh. I've thought about doing that for months and months, but I thought, "No, I don't want bad news to ruin my day."

I'm an active guy. I'm out there loading furniture and moving around. It's not like I'm sitting home behind a desk getting lethargic or whatever.

Because of that picture they took of me on Sunday, I decided to hop on the scale. Lo and behold, it instantly told me what my weight was, and it was 15 pounds lower than what I was afraid it was going to tell me.

All I want to say to you is, don't be afraid to find out the truth of where you are.

Now it's a game. I can't wait to go back and see whether eating salads and drinking a lot of water is going to help me lose even more weight. Now I know where I am. I know what I weigh, and I was pleasantly surprised. I told somebody over there, "It's like Christmas came early."

Don't be afraid to find out the truth of where you are - weight-wise, financially, or otherwise. If you haven't looked at your credit score in a while, go look at your credit score. Find out where you are. Then, from there, you can make plans to improve.

Until you know where you are, there's no way you can make a plan to move forward. Life is all about having a great experience and having some progress along the way.

We'll close with that thought. I got 14 out of 15 done. That's not bad for this kid.

Thanks for listening to the Junk Refund Show. We'll be back next Thursday at 3 o'clock Eastern on the BBS Radio Network.

God bless all of you. Have a great week. Come here Thursdays at 3 if you want to learn how to get the junk out of your home, your garage, and also out of your life.

I'm your host, Alan Cook. Have a great week.

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