ttfitz

Totally ruins my mental image of the man... Guess it's like that bus driver I had back in school who was called Shorty and was about 6'5" (that's 1.95 meters for @Cat)

Dave Berry would be so proud.

Hey, here's a question for @mycomicshop sellers, and maybe Conan will chime in if he has any thoughts. I had 15 books I gave them in Baltimore last year for consignment, and 10 of them have sold. The other 5 are getting to the point that I were I would probably drop the price to get it listed as "new in stock". There's a Prime auction going on now, and I wonder if anyone has any thoughts on when a good time to drop the price might be. Last time, I dropped prices right after the auction ended, thinking maybe I wasn't the only one who looked thru the listings to add something to my auction winnings, but only 1 book sold around then. So, anyone have any thoughts on whether I should change now, change after the auction ends, or wait a few weeks?

Ah, perfect! If you have a problem, If no one else can help ...and if you can find them. Maybe you can hire, The A-Team.

I'm a bit surprised by this - my wife has two pensions, and they both have provisions to pay her beneficiary (me) if she dies before she starts collecting.

Yep - while I agree with the general point of this thread, as way too many people don't have enough insurance, it's also possible to have too much insurance, too. When it comes to life insurance, the question is "Is there anyone who depends on my income that will need support after I'm dead, and if so, how much?" If the answer to the first part is "no" you don't need life insurance. Similarly, for many years now we've had a high deductible health insurance policy - we only need insurance for two things, to get the negotiated rate, and to cover a large bill. We can pay for the small, everyday things - often times, with the money we save by having a high deductible policy.

Glad I read ahead before posting, I was going to say the same. Lots of fun in those ads.

I'm not sure about this, but my accountant mentioned something that sounded like being able to claim and write yourself off, as an employee, IF you incorporate. That costs a bit more than a typical business license, $500 or more IIRC. I'm not sure what difference that would even make. GOD BLESS ... Perhaps, but if you read what I was responding to he said as a "non-business" so I took it as that. Even then, what you would deduct from your business income would be what you, the employee, is paid at a salary - and then you'd have to pay taxes on that as part of your income.

I believe item number "2" is something that can be taken into account, but none of the rest, you are right.

Aw, man, beat me to it! (I had a notification while I was typing in mine...)

A good place to find stuff people have been reading is this thread: In regards to the book you read, I recently read an actual "new" series that references those characters - and more from that time frame - called Danger Street. I rather enjoyed it.

Yeah, their system bumps up the price on eBay in order to pay the fees and still get what you have it listed for on their site. I wish there was some way to let people know it's available for less on their own site, but that's probably against the eBay terms.

Once again, only if the items are sold as part of a business. Make note of the place on the page about selling personal items, where it says "If you sold a mix of personal items at a loss and a gain, report losses and gains separately."

Only if I am in the business of selling football game tickets. From https://www.irs.gov/businesses/what-to-do-with-form-1099-k

I think it's a little unfair to suggest that nobody here has suggested they didn't have to pay taxes before and that's why they are upset about this change in reporting. There's been any number of responses that have basically said something along those lines - a recent one was something like (and despite the quotation marks, this is a paraphrase) "with these new requirements, selling isn't worth it, as it's a lot less fun and less profitable." It would only be "less profitable" if you weren't paying taxes on your profits before this. Nothing has changed in regard to what is supposed to be paid, only what is being reported to the IRS by others. That said, I can also sympathize with people who feels this puts a lot of additional trouble in their lives with no actual change in revenue to the government. I am a season ticket holder for Va Tech football - Go Hokies! - and last year, our dog was dealing with cancer, so we ended up not going to any of the games and I sold our tickets on SeatGeek. Despite the threshold being raised, I was sent a 1099k from SeatGeek for the gross amount of my ticket sales. All of those were sold for a loss, but now I will have to report those sales on my taxes and also report that my profit was zero. So yeah, there are things about this that are a pain. It just doesn't change what your tax obligation is.

It's been a long time since I've bought any oil stocks - but my wife worked for ExxonMobil for 17 years, so we've got stock from her time there which has been pretty good for us.

Ahem.

Nor I. But I also wouldn't be surprised to receive an assessment letter saying I owed $6. That letter likely wouldn't come until 2026 when the low level admin gets around to sending it but it will come. Well, if you got a 1099k and if you then didn't include that information on your return, then yeah, maybe you'll get such a letter. But I'd say the likelihood of getting a letter if you did report it - and reported that your cost basis was higher than the reported amount - is pretty low.

Seems nuts to pay $500 for a book, sell it for $500 and be expected to pay taxes on that. There was no profit. That's right, there's no profit, so there is no tax. I think when Sharon says "expenses" she isn't talking about the cost of the book, but other things like storage, office space, etc. If you aren't a business, you can't deduct those things - and if you have a loss on one item, it can't offset a profit on another. But other direct costs of the item, yeah, those aren't taxable income. From the IRS website (https://www.irs.gov/businesses/what-to-do-with-form-1099-k): Gross payment amount (Box 1a) The gross payment amount shows the total value of payments you received through payment card and third party network transactions. The gross payment amount isn't adjusted for any: Fees Credits Refunds Shipping Cash equivalents Discounts These items are not taxable income. You can deduct them from the gross amount. Check your records.

I had a reply ready, but then remembered that English wasn't your first language, so it might be a translation thing. In the usual English vernacular "a sure thing" when used in regards to something with a financial component means "it will definitely go right". So in that regard, spending $1k or more on ANY comic, raw or slabbed, is probably not "a sure thing." Now, if you meant do people do it, sure - if you know what you are doing (ie can accurately assess the proper grade, identify whether the book is restored or not, etc) you can get a good deal, and even then submit it for grading to increase the resale value. Like @Dr. Balls I don't buy comics as investments, so I haven't - but if there was a raw book I wanted for my collection that was priced fairly and I thought I could afford it, sure I'd spend that much on a raw. Probably would prefer it, actually, I'm not much of a fan of slabs in my collection.

Hmmm, I'm not sure it even tells us that. Once again, it shows percentages, and within the particular genre. So, let's do an extremely simplified hypothetical - let's say there are 100 reviews for "philosophy" books, and 10 for "Historical romance." From the chart, that means there were around 61 male reviewers (approximately 60 for philosophy and 1 for historical romance) and 49 female reviewers. I would agree that, given the heavy weighting towards genres where women reviewers predominate, it suggests that women probably review more than men. Assuming I found the right study that this came from, if we want to look at this in regards comic readers, there is actually something I found rather interesting listed in the abstract: "There are known gender differences in book preferences in terms of both genre and author gender but their extent and causes are not well understood. It is unclear whether reader preferences for author genders occur within any or all genres and whether readers evaluate books differently based on author genders within specific genres. This article exploits a major source of informal book reviews, the Goodreads.com website, to assess the influence of reader and author genders on book evaluations within genres. It uses a quantitative analysis of 201,560 books and their reviews, focusing on the top 50 user-specified genres. The results show strong gender differences in the ratings given by reviewers to books within genres, such as female reviewers rating contemporary romance more highly, with males preferring short stories. For most common book genres, reviewers give higher ratings to books authored by their own gender, confirming that gender bias is not confined to the literary elite. The main exception is the comic book, for which male reviewers prefer female authors, despite their scarcity. A word frequency analysis suggested that authors wrote, and reviewers valued, gendered aspects of books within a genre. For example, relationships and romance were disproportionately mentioned by women in mystery and fantasy novels. These results show that, perhaps for the first time, it is possible to get large scale evidence about the reception of books by typical readers, if they post reviews online."

As noted, the chart is about reviewers, not readers, and as a user of GoodReads, I'm not sure it is a good proxy. Further, the chart shows percentages, not numbers; that is, it shows than among those reviewers of philosophy titles, 60% are male, and 40% are female. So it really doesn't tell us anything about the subject line of this thread (at most comic books were reviewed by men more heavily than anything besides philosophy), nor how many men or women read/reviewed a particular genre. Signed, Captain Math, with an assist by The Pedantic Kid

Well, it's been over 50 years, and I was just a wee one, but I think it was more like this one:

When I was little, I wanted a Mickey Mouse gumball machine for Christmas. When I got it, I was very excited - my folks loved to tell how I would put in a coin, and say "Thanks for the gumball, Mickey!" Ah, the power of advertisement!

Happy to do so... what's the format it should adhere to? Can't say for the entire period that was mentioned, but the last 3 or 4 years I've taken part the thread title was "1000 books in 20xx"