When you begin shopping for good golf equipment, you’ll find that if you know how and where to look, it can be a very rewarding adventure. I’ve stumbled upon great deals a number of times just by dropping by summer yard sales. I’ve seen entire sets for $30. Single woods were $3. Granted, they weren’t the best of the best, but I don’t need the best of the best to play (until such time that I turn pro).

I would much rather put a couple hundred bucks in golf lessons from a professional golfer than to plop down $1200 or more for a set of clubs I may or may not use a lot.Yard sales, garage sales, auctions, and second hand stores will all have sets of golf clubs discounted. So yard and garage sales are the first place I’d look.

Next, I would log onto the largest online auction site in the world, ebay.com. For the past ten years Ebay has enjoyed a great reputation in the online auction and e-commerce world. You can find exceptionally good deals if you know how and where to look. But you do need a little patience because the deals may not end for five or six days from the time you begin looking. Then again, it may end in eight minutes. You just never know. At this writing, there were over 2924 golf club sets for auction. There were 11,677 golf ball sites offering their golf balls for sale. Search around on Ebay and you are sure to make some really good finds.

Amazon.com is another quality and reputable site for finding golf clubs at an affordable price. Many may be upgrading their set so they want to offload their clubs and make some money in the process. You have to search for the deals, but you can still find them.

One minor disadvantage to the online sites is that you don’t get to play with the clubs before you buy. Unfortunately you don’t always know for certain what you’re getting. The advantage though is that most major online sites have modest return policies (with plenty of cautions before you actually press Buy).

Finally, online golf-specialty sites (not Ebay-, Yahoo-, or Amazon-related) are other places I would turn to in order to find great used equipment. These sites are geared towards golf and typically have ‘golf’ somewhere in the site name.

You can buy decent equipment at affordable prices but you need to exercise a bit of caution. It’s fine to be cautiously skeptical about your buys. P.T. Barnum said it best: “there’s a sucker born every minute.” And he hadn’t even heard about the online world. Unfortunately, he’s right. You now know that not everyone you deal with online is as honest and trustworthy as you and me. Do some due diligence and read the reviews of the person you are buying from. If he (or she) has a ton of positive reviews, you increase your odds of success. Chances are very good that your purchase will also be very good. Avoid those who have very few buy and/or sell transactions. It doesn’t make the person untrustworthy, it just makes her inexperienced.