The perfect summer project for my kids

Summer is fast approaching and for the second year in a row my wife and I have decided not to put our kids in any summer camps. This is a luxury we have because I work out of my home but I won’t try to sugarcoat it—it’s a challenge keeping our kids occupied all day. And by occupied I don’t mean watching television and playing video games all day. That would be the easy way out.

The hard part is getting them to play outside, read a book or work on some sort of creative project. But this year, I think I’ve come up with something that will not only keep them occupied, but also give them a chance to earn a little cash in the process. Not to mention, it will go a long way in helping my wife and I clean out our basement.

You see in our basement are stacks and stacks of music CDs. I bet you there are at least 500 of them. I also bet you I haven’t listened to a one of them in over 3 years. There’s just no point any more. iPods, mp3 downloads and services like Pandora and Spotify have pretty much obsolete CDs in my household.

Amazon to the rescue

This is where the fun begins with my new project. Amazon recently announced a Music Trade-In program where you can trade in your CDs to Amazon in exchange for a gift card. You don’t get much. A couple bucks for newer CDs and far less for older CDs. But Amazon pays the shipping so what’s to lose?

But the point is, I don’t listen to these CDs any more and I probably never will. So why not get rid of them?

Only thing I don’t like is that you have to individually search for each CD you have to see if Amazon is currently offering any trade-in value for it. This could be extremely time consuming.

Anyone see where I’m going with this yet?

Sounds like a perfect project for my kids! I am going to let them go through all of the stacks of my CDs and see if they are available for trade-in on Amazon.com. If they are, I’ll let my kids trade them in and keep a portion (heck, I might just let them have it all) of the trade-in amount to buy themselves something when they are finished with the project.

If all goes well, I may even teach them how to list items on eBay!

What do you think? Great project for kids? Leave a comment below and let me know your thoughts.