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Hi Mike,
Glad to see you back. You have been missed.
I agree with Temudgin, that the victims in these meetups, tend to be the potential buyers who show up with the money. I doubt that a thief would even know what to do with the items you are selling.
If your goal is to unload these items, then a yard sale would seem to be the quickest way, but of course the sale prices would probably be lower.
As far as meetups go, common sense should prevail. Late nights and weird requests should be red flags.
Whether you want the buyers to know where you live is up to you. I’ve had them come to the house and also have met buyers as public locations near the house. I’ve never had an issue with any of them, except of course, for the flakes that never show up.
Hang in there Mike…
Please give Susan my best wishes and prayers. I hope she feels better soon.
JOE
The 1099 is a tax form sent to the IRS. It’s usually just the gross revenue paid to the business.
When I was a self employed trucker leased to a large carrier, a 1099 would be issued for all the revenue paid to the truck. Even though thousands of dollars were deducted for fuel, permits, insurance and many other items it was never reflected on the 1099. If I needed more details, I could print out the settlement (pay) sheets for each individual week and tally up all the deductions. It was up to me to ensure the deductions were correct.
I never worked for a carrier that wanted me to truly understand the cost of running my truck. They did however, want me to understand the advantages of constantly upgrading my equipment and taking every load given to me. “If the truck is sitting, it’s not making money”
It was not uncommon for a truck grossing $150,000 to bring home about $60,000, especially if he was leasing his truck from his carrier.
I suppose, Ebay may assist us in understanding profits, but I wouldn’t rely on them. In the end, a schedule C has to be filed with all the deductions anyway.
Using a business credit card has a higher level of risk and less consumer protections than a standard credit card. The owner has a greater duty to protect the security of the account, even if he is the only one with a card.
This is the main reason I don’t have business credit cards.
Clark Howard talks about this all of the time.
Just some food for thought..
Ok, I just looked at the cabin pictures… WOW. That is impressive. If you had plumbing in it, you could live there. The best part is the R30 insulation.. worth it’s weight in gold..
I’m officially jealous.. good for you and my compliments to the people who did the work.
For what it’s worth, I live in a climate where the humidity is very low, generally 15 to 30%. I have a full home HVAC air conditioner and an evaporative cooler (swamp cooler). Even though July and August see temperatures of about 100 degrees most days, I never use the air conditioner. Below is the Wikipedia explanation of evaporative cooling.
The house usually maintains a temperature of 75 to 80 degrees in the daytime and is usually quite comfortable. There is a connecting door to the garage (my Ebay area) that I leave open and it keeps things out there livable.
The electric rates out here are 23 cents per KWH. This is higher than most areas, a lot higher. My normal power bill is about $52 and in the summer months goes as high as $80. Running the HVAC would probably put me at $300+
This type of cooling only works in a low humidity environment. In my experience it works well up to about 105 degrees and after that is very marginal.
If anyone lives in a low humidity environment it’s surely worth considering and I’ve been very impressed with it.
Running all those A/C units and the radiant heat floors is going to use a lot of power. If the house isn’t well insulated, I’d really look into having it done. You may also want to look at your electric bill to get an idea of exactly how much power you are using. If you are on a tiered system, the rate goes up each time you move to a new tier.
Heat and Air conditioning are typically the largest portion of any residential electric bill. Even small improvements really add up.
Given all you’ve said, I’d be focusing on constructing a well insulated office work area within the building that can be independently cooled. It sounds like temperature control is very important to you and trying to maintain a constant temperature in the entire building would be very expensive. If you are on a tiered system, then all the additional power will be charged at your most expensive tier.
If you haven’t done so, I’d study your electric bill to understand how much power you are consuming and what it’s costing you. Many of the power company websites can assist in analyzing your usage.
Here in California, we have some of the highest electric rates in the country.
When I first moved here, my electric bill was double that of my old place. After analyzing the bill and determining that the electric company wasn’t picking on me, I did a lot of investigation and made some changes. The following month, my bill was down over 50% and very close to that of my old place.
It’s all a numbers game and fairly boring, but made me very happy.
I don’t have a precise answer to insulating the building. It all depends on which direction you go on cooling/heating it.
Hopefully someone else with a building can chime in with more specific advice.
Lumber, including plywood and 2 X 4 studs have gone up like crazy and are very close to all time highs. Before you make any decisions, you really want to investigate the material costs.
The ductless mini split A/C systems are great substitutes for a Full HVAC system in a home and in my opinion are the only way to go. For a single room, I think a window unit is the most practical solution.
A 230 volt 17600 BTU air conditioner is very powerful for a window unit and would need special wiring installed to operate.
The small window air conditioners are typically 115 volt (standard house wiring) 5000 BTU and go up from there.
I think your biggest issue would be humidity. An air conditioner also takes out the humidity as does a stand alone dehumidifier.
Electric heaters are power hogs.
As far temperature is concerned, you would probably want to insulate the building as best as you can first. the same would go for a separate office inside of it. Otherwise you’ll spend a fortune on your electric bill, trying to stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
Good luck with it. It sounds like the building will be real nice when done.
Yes, that’s very true.
In addition, anyone who is filing taxes as a reseller for the first time gets a huge reality check on what’s involved, such as documenting expenses to off set revenues and getting expert tax help.
This may end up pushing more people back to the flea markets and boot sales.
Wow, a high volume seller is one who has $5000 in sales.
It’s one thing to require Ebay to collect all that personal information, but to require it to be publicly disclosed is not a good idea.
I wonder how many resellers Georgia will lose if this passes.
The only risk is the cost of the router ($137.00), but I’m not too concerned about that.
I’ll probably call them next week. It’s totally plug and play and technically a prepaid service. The company is local and must have some kind of a deal to get the equipment and service.
If it works out, it will be a big upgrade for me.
Thanks
Evidently Ebay contacted the seller and they made another video.
Spoiler.. Ebay still contends it was routine.
Hi Jay,
Frontier is in the general area recently, but I don’t know if it’s in my specific area.
There is also a local company that installs what looks like a satellite dish on your house and provides service. The dish doesn’t point to space, but to their antennae up on the hill.
I see lots of complaints directed at both companies. Frontier is accused of having outages and bad customer service, while the fake satellite company uses shared data and people complain about speed and performance.
The plan I’m looking at says there is a 1 TB data limit per month, but they expect most people to be in the 150 to 300 GB range. The only activities they mention as abusive are continuous gaming and torrents. I think the pandemic has a lot to do with the gaming increases. Streaming of any kind is not mentioned and for me streaming in HD is not a priority.
The one thing I like about cellular is the reliability. The only time it gets slow at all is when I go over my limit (which happens every month) and there is heavy traffic out on the main road. Yes, my plan is unlimited, but not really… Some unlimited plans seem to be more unlimited than others.
Starlink looks like it will be a winner, when it’s available as does 5G.
Thanks
