3 Lessons about Selling Sports Tickets on Craigslist, Or, Why I'm a Moron

As I mentioned last week, over the last few months, I have managed to lose a good-sized sum of money by selling my extra season tickets for the San Diego Chargers on Craigslist.  While I have more or less sworn off of making money in this way, I learned a few things that I think could be helpful to others who are trying to make money selling tickets on Craigslist.

But today, I'd rather talk to you about the draft...

Nah, just kidding.  Here are my thoughts about selling football tickets on Craigslist.

1)  Don't Assume Prices Will Go Up - I bought a partial season ticket package (I received tickets to four of the eight home games).  For arbitrage to be successful, one must sell items for more than he or she paid for them (this is key).  Of the four games that I purchased, the ticket prices for only one of those games in the secondary market went up significantly.  For each of the other games, the tickets lost value (including one game in which market forces compelled me to sell three tickets for $10 a piece -- a $60 per ticket loss).  For the other two games, I lost about $15 to $20 per ticket.

2)  Make Sure to Maximize Profits - I purchased season tickets because the secondary market for one of the games (Green Bay at San Diego) was ridiculously expensive, and the Chargers organization, knowing that that was the marquis game of the season, did not allow fans to purchase tickets for that game alone.  Instead, fans had to buy at least a two game package.  Nevertheless, it has been a tradition for me and my family to go to a Chargers game at least once a season, so I thought I'd save us all (read: my family) money by buying the tickets as part of this package.

Then, on the morning of the game, which took place in beautiful, sunny San Diego, the unthinkable happened: it rained.  One of the people who was going to come to the game was my grandfather who, though spry for an 88 year old, is not really the sort of person who should be sitting in the rain for an extended period of time.  My uncle (understandably) decided to keep grandpa company, which left me stuck with two tickets.  Worried about the last minute nature of my plight, I hurriedly put the two tickets up on Craigslist.   While I did make a small profit, the sheer number of rapid responses to my posting led me to believe that I could have sold the tickets for quite a bit more.  When you consider that I felt compelled to pay my grandpa and uncle back for what they had paid me for the tickets, I didn't come out very far ahead at all.

Particularly when I lost money on the other games, I should have tried to sell the tickets for a lot more.

3)  Make Sure to Have Change - For one pair of tickets that I sold, the buyer and I had agreed to $110.  Absent-mindedly, I did not bring change with me.  The buyer only had twenty dollar bills (as he had just hit up an ATM on his way to meet me), so we were left with with three options: not selling the tickets, selling the tickets for $120, or selling the tickets for $100.  As I was leaving early the next morning to fly to a different state for a work conference, I wanted to get rid of the tickets (as dealing with buyers on Craigslist is a fickle, time-consuming enterprise), so not selling them wasn't really a great option for me.  He, of course, didn't want to pay more than we had agreed on, and so I was left taking less money than I had expected. 

I realize that $10 isn't a lot of money, but, as I had already lost so much money, any amount extra that I could get back would have helped.

In short, I think trying to re-sell tickets is a fool's errand, unless you can purchase the tickets for a significantly reduced rate.  If you're paying face value with the intention to re-sell, you are almost certainly paying too much.  Nevertheless, people can and do make money in this way, and I hope the above will provide a helpful, if cautionary, example.

Photo by me!

Why I'll Probably Never Buy Season Tickets Again

Even though my Chargers are looking quite a bit better than they did when I wrote this, they will still almost certainly not make the playoffs.  The biggest reason for this is Tim Tebow loves God, God loves Tim Tebow, and Tim Tebow is in the same division as the Chargers.

Seriously, if the game's close, the dude can't seem to lose.

Anyways, my point in all this is that the Chargers haven't had the great season that I (and many others) were pretty sure that they would.  Based on my belief that they would have a great season, I purchased a partial (4 game) season ticket package for several tickets under the hopes that I would be able to sell the extra tickets that I wasn't able to use.*

Had the Chargers had the tremendous season that I had expected, I probably could have made some money off of my extra tickets.  As it turns out, nobody wants to pay full-price to see a bad team play (and if that bad team is playing another bad team, as happened when the Chargers played the Chiefs, it gets really bad: I ended up selling some tickets with a face value of $70 for only $10 a piece).

I tried selling on Craigslist.  I tried selling on eBay.  I tried shaking down friends and acquantances, all to no avail.

While it makes me too sad to come up with a specific number, I easily lost several hundred dollars on my extra tickets.  And that is why, after my very expensive experiment in selling tickets, you can count me out of that particular game.  I'll be leaving the ticket-selling to the professionals, and I'll happily let some other sucker lose their money.

In short, if you are not absolutely certain that you will be able to use all the tickets you buy when you buy a season ticket, you probably shouldn't buy them.  I learned that the hard way.

*If you're wondering why I bought season tickets instead of just a single game ticket, here's the reason: my family really wanted to go to what turned out to be a super-expensive game if you bought the tickets in the secondary market (the Packers/Chargers game).  Because the Chargers organization knew that this was going to be a popular game, they didn't let people only buy tickets to that game; you could only buy tickets to this game as part of a package.

While I saved my family members money on this particular game by buying the season ticket package, I sure lost a heap of money on all the other games.  Oh well.  You live, you learn.

3 Personal Finance Lessons NOT to Learn from Storage Wars

I am a man of guilty pleasures; this I freely admit.  While I'm not a huge fan of reality tv in general, Storage Wars on A&E is a guilty pleasure of mine.  I am frequently in awe of the money that can be made from the abandoned units, especially from units that are apparently full of trash.

This is what came up in a search for trash. 
I am uncomfortable making any jokes about it.

For those of you unfamiliar with the show, each episode features auctions for unpaid/abandoned storage units.  There are four or five main characters who are primarily trying to make a profit from buying what is in the units for a cheap price, and then selling those same items at a higher price.  The catch to the auctions is that the bidders are not allowed to walk into the storage units; they have to base their bids only on what they can see.

One of the things about the series that draws me in is that I think the show describes a fun and interesting way to make money.  I also admire the series's regulars in their commitment and tenacity to making a living through arbitrage.  Plus, it is honestly exciting to see something rare and valuable found in a unit that was bought for relative pennies.

Even so, every episode has some combination of bad personal finance/business practices that SHOULDN'T be learned.  Here they are.

Craigslist Arbitrage - The Folly of my Youth

Craigslist arbitrage is a popular topic for blog articles recently. As I have just bought and sold something through Craigslist Saturday night, I thought I'd tell my story and jump on the bandwagon.

Like many of you, I love Craigslist. There's gray, there's blue, and it looks like it was designed in about 1996. What's not to love?

Anyways, two months ago, I was looking through the listings, and I came across what I thought was a pretty amazing deal. The listing stated that there were three long boxes of comic books that the owner was selling for $150 total. Long boxes contain between 250 and 350 comics a piece, so the worst case scenario for me was that I would be getting each comic book for twenty cents a piece. I figured somebody, somewhere would be willing to buy them off of me for at least fifty cents a piece, so I thought I could easily make a handsome little profit. I thought, "How can I go wrong?", and I bought the books from a guy in a pickup truck in the parking lot of a Taco Bell.

As you can imagine, the thought "How can I go wrong?" is probably the worst thought a person can think when they are making an investment, which was how I viewed the purchase. I was briefly interested in comics back in junior high, but I'm not exactly a collector, so the main reason I purchased them was not to appreciate them by reading them but to appreciate them by selling the for a high price.

As I started to go through the comics, I realized that most of them were from the 80s and 90s. When I did some research, I realized that most comics from this period aren't worth a whole lot due to two factors:

1) During this period, comic publishers printed a lot more books, and

2) People started taking a lot better care of the comic books that they had.

As such, with an abundance of comic books all in great condition, the comic books that I had bought were basically worthless.

Uh-oh.

Undeterred, I decided to post a handful of the comic books on eBay. None of them sold. I then tried listing them for two cents a piece in an effort to make up my costs in the shipping charges. One comic book sold. I probably would have continued reposting on eBay, but eBay stopped a promotion they had going in which the seller didn't have to pay anything at all if the item didn't sell. It didn't make sense to me to spend money to attempt to sell something that probably wouldn't sell.

So as you can imagine, I was in a bit of a funk. And not in a good way.

So, I decided to go back to Craigslist. First, I started by posting listings trying to sell them one box at time. I started at $100/box. Nobody bought one. Then I moved to $75/box. Nobody bought. I would have gone to $50/box, but my goal in buying them was to make a profit, and I wasn't ready to give up just yet.

As of two weeks ago, these three boxes (as well as two others I had bought in my initial zeal at the moneymaking opportunities in buying and selling comic books) still sat collecting dust in my extra bedroom. As my mother-in-law is coming to visit from North Dakota in September, my beautiful wife beckoned me nearer to her, and whispered faintly and lovingly into my ear, "I'ma cut you if you don't get these comics out of my house."

So, as you can see, the die had been cast, so I decided upon a new method: I was going to put the original three boxes up on Craigslist (I think the other two boxes have some more valuable comics, so I believe they will be worth the time [and potential stabbing that may transpire] by putting them on eBay), and I was going to keep lowering the price every two days until they sold.

I started at $400 (remember, my goal was to make money, so I might as well start high). No dice. I didn't hear anything when I listed them for $375 or $350 either. However, when I listed them at $325, I had two people contact me.

The first person was a jerk, and I think he just wanted to waste my time. He can go sit on a cheese grater.

The second person, however, actually committed to driving an hour to come over to my condo to check them out. Since he was driving that far, I knew that he was fairly interested. When he arrived, he looked through them, and said something along the lines of, "Well, I don't think I have too much use for these."

This is a classic negotiating move. My Craigslist posting had mentioned that I wanted to get rid of them so that I could have the space, so he knew that I wanted to get rid of them, so he knew that I would probably lower the price.

I replied to him, "I'm just trying to get rid of them. Is there any offer you think you could make?"

He said, "How low would you go?"

At this point, in retrospect, I should have said $250, which was how low I had told myself I wanted to go.

However, because I was worried that he really would walk out the door (and because I had been trying unsuccessfully to sell these comic books for the better part of two months), I said, "I could probably go as low as $200."

He too easily agreed to $200 (which is why I should have said $250: his saying he didn't want them was just a ruse).

He paid me, and I helped carry them out to his Escalade.

I think that my biggest lesson learned is that I need to be a better negotiator in person. If I would have said $250, I really think he would have gone for it, and, even if he didn't, I still could have lowered the price again to $200 and ended up in the same place.

Still, I'm happy that I made $50 on what my research had shown were worthless comics. $50 on a $150 investment is a 33% profit, which is none too shabby.

Have any of you ever sold anything through Craigslist, or tried buying something cheaper and then reselling it somewhere else? Let me know in the comments.

Update 09/12/2011:  I am pleased to mention that this post was featured in the Carnival of Personal Finance #326.