I’ve seen Amazon advertise their Trade-In program a few times, and I’m trying it out!

First, I grew tired of MAG, and I’d rather play MW2 with friends, so I’m selling it to max out my value while it’s still pretty new. But feeling lazy and not wanting to bother with Ebay, I decided to check out Amazon’s trade-in program.

It’s run by a third party, but it’s super easy to do. You search for the game you want to trade-in, if they want it, it shows a price. Since I was going to send one game, I figured I’d look around and find other games I never play and see what I can get for them. Turns out I’ve got 26 games I never play…so might as well trade them in!

Once they give you a price, and a free shipping label, you have seven days to send them in. The only iffy thing I see is that if the items are damaged or not what you were supposed to send, they won’t send it back. For videogames they say:

For video games and movies, this includes the correct disc(s), manual, cover art, bundled accessories, UPC, and case.

I have all original packaging and manuals though, so I’m not worried about that.

Total I’m getting $170 for all of it. Everything from Zelda: Twilight Princess on Wii (booooring!), to Rogue Leader on the GameCube (hey, $1.75 is better than nothing!). I could probably get more on Ebay, but the hassle of running 26 auctions, many of which probably would get me nothing (seriously, who wants Rogue Leader from 2001?), and it just made more sense to get a nice chunk of change with practically zero effort.

Once I get my Amazon gift cards I’ll comment to let you know how the process went. They also take trade-ins for dvds and textbooks too.

When I get something in my head it’s really hard to get it out. Usually this is tied to desiring new technology or something of that nature. Luckily I have a wife who tempers that urge to buy every new gadget the minute I want it. Sometimes that means I don’t get it, or instead I think of inane arrangements to justify my purchase.

The wheels in my brain are still spinning about wanting to play the latest and greatest baseball game on PS3, so I start to find all these ways to pay for it, without actually spending money, which of course is ludicrous. But it sounds like it’s not costing any money, which is the genious of my plan. You might remember my WoW fast back in ’04. I could pull a similar stunt here, but it would take a while. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

$60 – Money left in my old Wamu checking account that’s been there since we got married.

$170 – Money I made at school doing supervision, like watching kids on my lunch break. (This is above and beyond my regular pay, so it’s easy to argue that I can do whatever I want with it, like buy videogames.)

$80 – Money in my paypal account from selling the old Gamecube (which was supposed to pay for the Wii. Shhhh!)

$50 – Approximate money I could get from selling my original Xbox since I wouldn’t need it anymore.

$27 – Money I could get from selling Zelda: Twilight Princess. (I tried to play it over the weekend, and I almost went insane it’s so boring. But my new found distaste for adventure games is another post entirely.)

Sub-Total: $387
Remaining: $313

I’m still well shy of my $700 target. I’ve made almost $250 on my Nintendo stock, but I’m not sure I can justify including that in my scheme.

Time to look around the house for stuff to sell.