[swearwolf]

This has become a big problem for people in a niche community I participate in - guitar collecting. A lot of people in that community like to buy guitars, use them for a while, then sell them on Reverb or eBay to fund the next purchase. Typically we sell them at a slight loss, because we’ve usually made some kind of improvements like new components or adjustments to the setup.

With the new reporting rules, it’s now far more complicated to do this. You need to have a receipt for each purchase, otherwise you’re on the hook for the tax on the entire amount of the purchase. Problem is, a lot of gear is purchased through face to face cash sales, where no receipt is generated. Or, the gear was purchased so long ago that the receipt is long gone. And if you make any improvements, better hope you have the receipts for all of those, plus some way to figure out how much value to assign to your time, and the patience to either figure all this out on your taxes or the extra money to pay someone else to do it.

It’s just not worth it anymore to sell online. For now, we’ll head back to Craigslist. It’s really a shame because for a while their Reverb really had a neat thing going.