Need to raise money to cover expenses. Anyone have advice on how a beginner can get started selling items online?

You need to start with knowing what the prevailing value of any item is. Search for the same or similar items online and see what others are selling them for (and if they are selling at all). Maybe sell the less valuable items in a garage sale or in bulk on craigslist, FaceBook Marketplace or Nextdoor.com and the more valuable items on eBay. But the more things you sell individually, the more management there is and you could be getting a lot of responders to have to keep track of. Vintage books can have more value than what you think but need to be in very good condition. Realtors are often looking for used furniture for home staging. Costume jewelry is in demand but again, depends on if it's a name brand and a desireable design. Porcelain china, silverware...sometimes the demand depends on where you live, and also the time of year (don't bother selling Christmas stuff unless it's late Oct, Nov or early Dec. Good luck!

I sell on eBay and it's pretty simple, even for beginners. The BUYER pays the shipping, so it doesn't cost you anything, plus when you list an item, the shipping page comes up and the costs are calculated FOR you when you punch in the size & weight of the box.

I will tell you, however, that it's hard to sell things w/o name brands. I never buy items to sell that don't have a well known brand b/c when people search, they search for a name brand. Household items that are large will be too heavy or bulky to ship b/c the costs are prohibitive. Larger items are cheaper to ship via Fedex ground b/c eBay gives a big discount for Fedex. There's just too much to cover in a post here, so you can use the eBay tutorial for more info.

Another suggestion I have for you is to hire someone to do an Estate Sale for you. Or do an Estate sale yourself. Go to Estatesales.net and you can list the sale for $99; most sales run for 3 or 4 days depending on how much stuff you have to sell. You'll need a few people in the house to help you run the sale, too, and you'll need cash to hand out change. You can hire a company to run it for you and they'll take upwards of 40% of the profits but they'll set it up FOR you, price everything, and figure out how to get rid of what's left (if you want them to).

If you don't have tons of stuff, do a yard sale/garage sale. Then you don't have to deal with shipping and all that aggravation like posting photos and paying eBay fees, etc. It can be quite a learning curve for someone who doesn't even have an email account set up yet!

Wishing you the best of luck!

If the eldercare lawyer was for Mom, you can use her money if she has any.

I find the Facebook yard sale groups are great. Find the one in your town. You just upload a picture and put in price or discription. You can have them "porch pickup" or meet somewhere. Cash only if u wish.

Then there is Market place on FB. Problem with Market place is sometimes u need to ship it so need to add postage and handling to the price.

I will say I find that doing this opens one to constant complaints, and that postal costs makes it almost impossible to get online items when things are cheaper and free postage on amazon. I sold collections of things and did well with it but due to costs of postage I would not try it now; I did it decades ago.

There are all sorts of tutorials online on how to use sites such as Ebay to sell items.

However, have you considered trying to find a consignment shop? Depending on what you're looking to sell, it might be easier for you to go that route than deal with online selling; only you can determine if it's worth taking possibly less money than go through the hassle of boxing/shipping items and dealing with online payments.

Good luck.