In an extraordinary success story, Demi Skipper manage to trade a single hairpin for a house through a series of ever improving swaps. If you're wondering what New Year's resultion to make, how about trying this...?
It all began during lockdown early last year when Skipper, a San Francisco resident, stumbled across a TED Talk by Kyle MacDonald, who was explaining how he once swapped a red paperclip for a house over a year. Needless to say, Skipper was inspired and decided to take the challenge and hoped to reach her goal by the end of summer.
Her journey took her from cheap earrings to four margarita glasses and then to a Bissell vacuum cleaner, a Peloton bike to a diamond necklace, and so on, by using whatever she had to score a better asset. She used Craigslist, eBay, and Facebook to make the trades one at a time. She made a total of 28 trades, and documented the process, dubbed Trade Me Project, through her Instagram account.
Now, thanks to the magic of trading, Skipper has the keys to a small house with a big garden near Nashville, Tennessee, just a few months later than she was hoping for, but with no mortgage and no money paid.
“There were just so many negative people saying it wasn’t possible. I was willing to do this for five years if that’s what it took to get to the house," Skipper told The Guardian. "I wake up and I’m like ‘is this real?’ I have the house. I traded this from a bobby pin!"
Skipper and her husband will relocate from California to Tennessee in January, but just for a short time, as a new adventure awaits. “I will be renovating the house and trading the house to someone who really needs it for a bobby pin. From there, I will start again,” she said.