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Vehicle expenses, Scavenging weekend trips, Home office deduction, etc.
When you are a sole proprieter with a home based business, pretty mnuch EVERYTHING I spend money on becomes deductible in some way.
Some examples:
I had just over $5k in mileage deductions this year.
The home office deduction lets me deduct a percentage of all of my home expenses. That adds up huge.
This year I added a door to an exterior wall in my ebay space – deductible.
The scavenging weekend trips are a joint business trip/family mini getaway. I come back with a car full of inventory and we also get to have a bunch of fun as a family.
It’s all 100% legit. Taxes is a game – the more you understand the rules, the better you are at playing.If I made substantially more, I could even pay my kids a salary as employees. I have 5 kids so I could tax shelter up to $60k a year directly into their own college funds and/or IRA accounts. I say “could” because I would have a hard time ethically justifying that in my situation. I likely would not do it unless I was actually paying them by having them do real work.Having said that, LOTS of folks totally “pay” their kids up to the standard deduction so it is tax sheltered profit. That’s probably one of the most abused tax laws because the kids can “gift” the money right back to the parent, tax free!
Had a fun one this weekend.
Buyer asked me to measure the cuff width on a pair of jeans priced at $30. I got the measurement for him, he said thanks, then made an offer. His offer was…$12. I declined and he sent a new offer of $17. I declined again and he sent a message that said “Do you want to make a counteroffer and we can negotiate from there? Might be a good idea”.I replied “I would have been happy to if your offers were worth countering.”
He responded “That’s fair” and then made a reasonable offer. I countered and he accepted. I did check his feedback left for others before I accepted his offer.
Sometimes things work out for the best.
Items in Store 1495
Items Sold 33
Total Sales $1,042.00
COGS $107.00
Total Profit $935.00
Average profit $28.33
Average sales price $31.58
New Listings 0I finished my taxes this weekend. It feels good to get that out of the way early. It also feels good to already have plenty of money in the bank, all bills/credit cards fully paid off, AND have vacation paid for in advance. It’s been quite a few years since I was in this position going into tax refund time! I also have the 5th child tax credit this year. Cha-ching!!!
Last year I reported earnings of 0 for my ebay business. The year before that I posted a slight loss. This year I went whole hog – I showed an income of approximately $2500. I’m sure I could have scrounged together $2500 more in deductions…but no need to get too greedy!
Troy’s point of having to get a real job to qualify for financing really highlights the double edged sword of business deductions. Troy I believe it is possible that the bank could even call your loan if you technically didn’t have the qualifying income to support said loan, even if you can technically afford it. That is scary!
In other business, I still have alot of home projects taking up time. I’ve been hitting it pretty hard in the ebay space prior to 2 weeks ago, so it isn’t a bad thing that I stepped back for a few weeks. Thankfully my store has kept on performing at a high level in spite of my lack of listing activity.
Back during glitchapalooza at the beginning of 4Q last year I posted on here about how my impressions had dropped 30%. I didn’t get many responses then.
Eventually I recovered and my store is performing at an all time high.You are still listing at a high rate and I have the impression that you “pre research” your purchases much like I do so you aren’t likely listing dead inventory.
So back to the impression drop – did it tail off over some time or just drop off like a cliff? That would be valuable data to inform if your business is just not doing as well or if something is wrong on ebay’s end. For me the drop was a definite cliff – in September they dropped like a rock on a specific day and stayed down for about 6 weeks.
I’ve never seen the original shipping checkbox on an INAD case.
It’s always there on a standard return.I just watched an episode of The Imagineers Story on Disney+ and Disney went through this EXACT scenario in the early 80’s. All of the exact same verbage was used.
There though, they paid off the hostile investor, fired the CEO, and fought off the takeover/sellof to become the behemoth they soon became.Items in Store 1521
Items Sold 35
Total Sales $1,197.00
COGS $132.00
Total Profit $1,065.00
Average profit $30.43
Average sales price $34.20
New Listings 010 weeks in a row with sales over $1K! I KNEW my store was capable of this, and it still pisses me off that ebay had their big 4Q glitches last year that killed my store.
I’ve been covering ALL of my monthly expenses with ebay profits during this 10 week stretch, which is a BIG freaking deal.
This week I did get a bunch of listings created but haven’t done the pictures yet so no new listings. Busy week prepping for our daughters birthday party.
This week I have some household tasks to do. I’ve also told my wife that since my ebay store has done so well lately that we will start making plans to redo our kitchen and paint the house.Have a great week everyone!
Ebay SHOULD have had their foot on the throat of all these startups like Etsy, Mercari, Posh. If they would have sold off stubhub and classifieds they could have BOUGHT their competition.
International sale and they just left you a neutral? That’s a blessing.
They could have filed and INAD and then you would have been screwed.
Same with a negative, nothing you can do about it if they are complaining about the quality/cleanliness.I’ve gotten a few neutrals before. I always respond to the feedback and move on.
Something along these lines:
“I strive for 100% customer satisfaction. Buyer did not reach out to me before leaving feedback.”I was out doing ebay during the superbowl.
I’ve lost all interest in football at this point in my life.Items in Store 1560
Items Sold 32
Total Sales $1,242.00
COGS $123.00
Total Profit $1,119.00
Average profit $34.97
Average sales price $38.81
New Listings 27Busy weekend! I was finally able to pick up all the rolling stock carts I bought at a closing Kmart at the beginning of January. 4 of them were welded, and 5 were able to (mostly) break down. I was able to fit ALL of them in my pickup truck in one load. Yesterday my son and I put them back together and I started to put them to use. Needless to say I’m quite sore this morning. I put 4 of them in my inventory building and 5 stay in my ebay working space (garage). These carts are 2’x4′ and almost 6′ tall. They are heavy duty industrial carts – not the cheap chinese crap on amazon. Originally they were likely around $500 each.
I’m entering the “next level” with over 1500 items and these carts will allow me to reorganize and expand quickly. I expect I will cross 2000 listings very soon now that I have so much more free space.Sales wise, this was my 9th consecutive week with over $1k in sales! I did have 3 very soft days though, which makes me think the slowdown is coming. I’ll be very surprised if I cross $1k this week. I’ll do my best though!
Thank you for being willing to share your experiment!
I’m looking forward to your results too!The main thing that keeps me from cross posting is photos.
If a service came along that would automatically download my ebay photos, add white borders to make them square then upload them to the extra sites, auto manage ending listings when things are edited or sell then I would be all about it.If I lost out on a fully deductible “business trip” to Vegas due to this decision, I’d probably be upset too. Lol.
I understand the logic of getting to more people with the smaller events, but it should have been done in tandem. This most certainly has more to do with their poor year end reports than it does with “helping more ebay sellers”.
You can get an Iphone 6s or an iphone SE for less than $100 brand new quite regularly now.
Best Buy is doing the SE for $60
https://slickdeals.net/f/13814234-32gb-simple-mobile-apple-iphone-se-prepaid-smartphone-silver-60-free-shipping?src=SiteSearchYou can get a 6S all day long at Walmart for $100.
You definitely do not need an apple computer to use an iphone. You just download itunes to let you back up your data, or simply offload the photos to your desktop.
I love iphones because they are easy to use, highly intuitive, incredibly reliable, and upgrading is seamless.
