ebay question

From: Zane H. Healy <healyzh_at_aracnet.com>
Date: Wed Nov 5 15:32:45 2003

>2) Hypothetically, say I sell an item on Ebay for... oh... $2500.00. The guy
>could pay me via paypal, or he could send me a cashiers check. Does Paypal
>report transactions to the IRS? Or more importantly, if I sell items on ebay
>all year... do I have to track all that and report to IRS? Never really
>thought of it cause it probably isn't much money anyways. But I am curious
>if ebay and/or paypal reports to the IRS.

This is a very good question. Unfortunately I think there are two separate answers, with the primary one being you need to talk to someone that professionally prepares taxes. The other answer, is that this is going to vary from state to state.

Having said that, I suspect this falls under "Hobby Income", and that if you don't make a profit it might not be taxable. At least I hope this is the case, as things are almost to the point that my wife can start selling chunks of my collection off, and I'm pretty sure that in the long run I won't make a profit.

                        Zane

-- 
--
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh_at_aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
|                                  | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |
Received on Wed Nov 05 2003 - 15:32:45 GMT

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