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Article: The Value Proposition In Audio: Buying And Selling Used Equipment


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10 minutes ago, davide256 said:

I'm not sure that used audio is  as good a deal as it used to be. I see a lot of folks trying to sell used for 90% of new, whereas 80% or less used to be the rule.

For a 10 % savings used isn't worth the uncertainties to me.

I used to buy used just to experience different things.  I resold at little or no loss with little or no effort.  These days, the effort and associated risks deter me from the practice.  
 

So much new stuff is now so cheap that shipping costs can double its price when resold, while new items are often shipped free.  So a DAC that delivers to your door new for $200 is not such a good buy used when you add shipping, unless the asking price is half or less of its original cost.  The low marginal cost of a new one over the same item used is a major reason for the decline in great value in the resale market.

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On 6/27/2022 at 1:00 PM, bbosler said:

I don't get it. These same people will add $20 to a $100 restaurant tab for a tip and think nothing of it, but ask them to spend $30 for the convenience and protection that PayPal gives them on a $1000 sale and they freak out, or worse they use F&F to cheat PayPal out the fee they agreed to pay when they opened an account

I think there are two factors driving that.  First, if you do 100+transactions a year, the 20% adds up to thousands.  They're making the decision to risk a few bad transactions for the additional money.  And the IRS now monitors PayPal etc to tax anyone who receives more than $600 /year through such transactions.  The F&F tier is not (yet) monitored.

 

Save your receipts to show the IRS that you paid more for an item that you received when you sold it.  If you're selling for profit, gains are taxable.  I think the IRS eliminated the hobby provisions this year, so you can no longer deduct hobby expenses up to the amount of money you made from your hobby.

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  • 2 months later...
42 minutes ago, Frank Guerrero said:

A simple principle I use, and look for: I always keep the original packaging. Besides adding (more) legitimacy to the purchase, it also shows a potential buyer that I've cared (valued) the equipment enough to keep it. It goes without saying: it increases the risk of shipment damage.

No question about it - having the original packaging is both really nice and a sign of a caring owner.  The problem with getting old is that most of us eventually downsize and lose the storage spaces we had / found / created / appropriated.  This makes it very hard to keep large, bulky boxes.  So, for example, I kept the packaging from my Focal towers for years in the basement of our house, but I had to disgard it when we retired, downsized, and moved to our condo apartment.  I had so many boxes from things I still love and use that it was just not practical to take it with us and not worth the cost of paid storage space.

 

I still have the original boxes from small stuff like my 1969 SME 3009.  I even kept the boxes from my Prima Luna power amp, and I don't honestly know why.  But nothing larger than the box from my espresso machine made the cut when we retired.

 

The biggest packaging error I ever made was when the original box from the Rogers LS3/5a monitors that I bought new in early 1976 was severely water damaged by a leaky hot water heater.  I don't know how the LS3/5as are packaged now, but when they first came out, a matched pair came in a single box.  The cardboard was soaked through, as was the internal padding.  It was totally useless as a box, so I studpidly threw it all out.  Now that I'm thinning the herd, I wish I had that box to go with the Rogers (currently posted in the AS classifieds).  

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