Google is your friend. You may have to drive a ways to find a good thrift store. There are many listed on google in your area. You will have to visit them all (or most of them) and "pre-qualify" ones you will return to. Map them out within an hour of your home. Of the 15 to 20 around here, only two of them ever have bikes. Thrift stores are a real crap shoot. And 90% of the time, they have nothing.

Garage sales: they have garage sales in the Boston area. Just look on Craigs List. I took a quick look and there are a dozen or more right now with bikes for sale this weekend. And fortunately, many of the ones with bikes will not list them in the ads. So that means even more bikes are available. You have to be willing to do some hunting. It can be the better part of a day scouting out garage sales.


The great deals are not free. The cost is mainly in the time and gas spent looking for the deal. Only the people willing to do the work are going to find the deals. How far are you willing to drive? How many hours/days will you put into going to garage sales? I pick up bikes at garage sales about every other week (I go to them every week), which means I totally strike out half the time. Which means you will spend all day looking and find nothing. And then another weekend, you will find four or five.... And you need to be ready to take all five.

The deals are not in my neighborhood.


So that's just a few ways to get bikes well below market. Its a lot of work. The lazy way is to just watch Craigs List and either pay full market or be ready to pounce immediately whenever a below market deal pops up (and luck out and beat out the other lazy people doing the same thing). The below market stuff will not last long on C/L, so there is no time to research it/get it later when it is convenient, etc. I have driven pretty far to snag some C/L deals.

Finding deals is a very active process. They do not just happen to pop up at convenient times. Usually it is the result of actively searching all the time.