That unused phone sitting in your desk drawer isn’t just collecting dust. It’s also quickly losing value—hundreds of dollars in cash you could put in your pocket by trading it in or selling it online.
It’s likely you have one or two unused old devices you’ve forgotten. Once we upgrade to a newer model, roughly every 38 months in the U.S., according to market researcher International Data Corp., many of us just set our old phones aside. There are hundreds of millions of such idle devices in the U.S., according to used-device buyer EcoATM.