What percent of your life savings is in Baseball Cards?

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Posted By: Jim VB

Johnny H,



Consult a tax advisor, but my understanding is that, as Eric said, YOU bear the burden of reporting all sales, whether the auction house reports it or not. To the best of my knowledge, no auction house currently reports this information. If they did, they would have to get a SSN (or business equivalent) from all consignors. They would also send you a 1099 at the end of the year.



Ebay/Paypal recently agreed to begin reporting info from high volume sellers. I believe the agreement begins with the sales made during the year 2010, but don't quote me on that. It will impact only those with high dollar and/or high unit volume. I'll try to find a link to the story for you.



Currently, for most of us, this would be reported as a capital gain and be subject to prevailing rates. These will vary based upon whether you have owned the card more than a year (long term gain-roughly 15%) or less than a year (short term gain-same percentage as your normal income.)



Most importantly, don't accept any of the advice you get from me, or anyone else on a message board, without researching it yourself. I am 100% sure the IRS will not accept "I read it on Net54!" as a valid defense.



Best of luck.


Here's one article. There are many more online.

http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/comments/2008/8/1218129000.html

The key feature is that Paypal is required to report all info for sellers who receive over $20,000 and 200+ transactions in a single year.