I'm one of the people that did this when I had to quit my career.
I got lucky in a sense because I started the business with a partner (who also has health problems, though very different from mine and also had to quit his job) and we got almost all of our early inventory from his neighbor who had an entire attic full of rare comic books that we sold on commission (something neither of us knew anything about so we had to research and learn to roughly grade each one). We were able to get about $30k worth of stuff to sell at zero risk to us.
After we sold most of that, the first year, we moved onto sports cards because my partner knew a lot about baseball cards especially. We would go to eBay on weird times (like Tuesday nights when there is less traffic) and bid for things that were being sold way too cheap, then turn around and sell it for what it was actually worth. It's a tedious process and we are constantly scanning for things. The good thing though is this is something that can be entirely done online. We eventually started going to thrift stores, too, but there are way too many resellers at those now and there isn't enough there to pay the bills with so it's almost not worth it. We used to go daily, now we go a few times a week tops.
Anyway, between sourcing and shipping, it is a 10-12 hour day, 7 days a week if you want to survive that way. And both of us are having to share one place and one car (and are both constantly scanning online for items). It's not exactly easy but doable. If you had a place already paid for, it would be much easier and less stressful, though.
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, so I'm not sure that step is entirely necessary.
