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’d rather toss down a three or four hundred by getting private instruction from a golf pro than to drop $1350 for a mediocre set of clubs. Thrift stores are great for the bargain hunter. Garage sales, auctions, and yard sales will all sell golf clubs at affordable prices. Again, they aren’t exactly out-of-the-box new so you will need to check out the shafts to make sure they haven’t bowed or a disgruntled golfer didn’t throw it (and subsequently bend it when it hit the ground) in anger at missing at slicing the ball onto an entirely different fairway. Still, you should be able to find something reasonable if you look hard enough.

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 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 sites (not Yahoo-, Ebay- or Amazon-related) are the last place I would turn to in order to find great reconditioned golf equipment. These sites are geared towards golf. Buying from these sites is an area that you need to be cautious about.

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.