Good golf equipment can be cheap if you know where to look. I can’t count how many times I’ve gone to yard sales in the summer in my neighborhood and to find an entire set of clubs for $20. Granted, I’m almost certain they weren’t top of the line stuff, but they were suitable for how I play.

I’d rather plop down a few hundred bucks into learning how to play golf from a pro than to throw down $1100 for a set of clubs I may not use consistently. Garage sales, auctions, yard sales, and thrift stores will all have sets of golf clubs for very reasonable prices. Again, they aren’t new so you do need to check out the shafts to make sure they aren’t bowed. But those neighborhood summer sales would be the first place I’d look.

Next place I would seek out is on ebay.com, the largest online auction site in the world. They have a great business model and you can find really good bargains if you know where to look. As I write this there were over 3000 golf club sets for sale. There were 12,500 golf ball sites that sold golf balls. I even saw a “used golf ball” category. Go online to Ebay and search around, you are sure to find deals.

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 disadvantage to these online sites is that you don’t get a first hand look and touch before you buy them. In that sense, you truly are buying a pig in a poke. Most major online sites have decent return policies, but I have yet to see a quality return policy that makes the customer happy.

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.