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.

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.

Saving Money Doing What You Like to Do #1 - Five Easy Ways to Save Money Buying on Ebay

This is the first of what I hope will be a long and informative series of posts dealing with issue of how to do what you already like to do for less money.

Ah, Ebay. In fifteen years, you have gone from not even being a real word to a monolith in the American and global economy. Whether looking for tennis shoes or a shark's tooth, theatre tickets or croquet wickets, savvy shoppers the world over come to Ebay frequently to do business with normal folks and larger companies around the world.

Nevertheless, Ebay can be a daunting experience for newcomers, and one of the most frequent questions asked about Ebay is "How can I get the best value for my money?" In the five points below, I hope to give some helpful tips and tricks to ensure that you can know the excitement of finding that perfect deal. Some of my tips may be looked upon as obvious by veterans, but I believe that they bear repeating here.

1) Do your Research - All right, so you've fired up your browser, typed in ebay.com, typed, say, "Hello Kitty Doll" into the search bar, and you are super excited at seeing the exact doll that you want for $25 under the "Buy It Now" option. You hurriedly click "Buy It Now" and proceed through checkout. Congratulations! After you've bought it, you peruse some of the other listings, only to find that many of the other auctions are selling the same dolls for only $10! Alas! Though you got exactly what you wanted immediately, you didn't get the best price.

Whenever you search for something on Ebay, it is a good idea to first make sure that you have the items sorted by "Ending Soonest." For some reason, Ebay tends to default to the "Best Match" option, which I don't find particularly useful; I can see that I have received a page of exactly what I was looking for: in what sense is one option better than another within this view?

Once you have them sorted correctly, I recommend looking over at least three or four of the search pages. What you should look for is how much of price difference there is between similar items. Once you see the price difference, you should evaluate why there is a price difference. As an easy example, the prices of items ending soonest are usually quite a bit higher than items just listed; this is obviously due to the fact that items ending soonest have received multiple bids while just listed items probably have no bids at all. An application of this principle is in my second point.

2) Watch Shipping Costs - I hate the feeling (I have experienced it, and I am sadder but wiser for it) of thinking I've gotten this amazing price on an item, only to realize that I actually paid much more due to a ridiculous shipping price. Sellers are free to charge whatever they want for shipping and handling, and it is not always reasonable.

In the month leading up to Christmas, Ebay ran this series of heavily discounted items that could be great presents for the family, and, as a cherry on top of the sundae, they offered free shipping. If there are two similarly priced items from sellers that you trust, use the shipping price as a tie breaker.

3) Wait Until the Last Minute - Ebay was built on the principle that you wouldn't have to be there at the auction's end. You could simply put in a bid of the price that you would like to spend no more than, and the bid price would go up incrementally as other people bid. When I have done this in the past, I find that my the final price ends up being curiously close to my maximum bid. I'm not going to suggest that all sellers (under different identities) bid up their prices to make sure they get the most money, but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it does happen from time to time.

With that being said, I have found that I frequently am the most satisfied with the price I get in an auction if I sit and watch it for the last five minutes before the auction closes. With a minute or so to go, I swoop in and bid the price up a couple dollars. Sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't, but when I do, it is an exciting time.

I did this when I purchased my wedding gift for my wife; I saw a great price on a pair of diamond earrings in an auction that was ending in a couple of days. Fortunately, over those days, the price didn't rise that much. In the last couple minutes, another bidder and I got into a bidding war, and the price raised a couple hundred bucks, but I still came out ahead, and I ended up with a great deal on a pair of earrings. I paid about $800 for about 1 carat total weight of diamonds of vs2 quality, which, if you know anything about diamonds, is an absolutely amazing deal. In looking at these diamonds, however, I had to make a decision that relates to my fourth point.

4) Evaluate Risk versus Reward - One of the issues that affects price in an Ebay auction is the seller's rating. How credible is he? Does he usually sell what he says he would sell, or is the quality different than he listed it? How many people has he sold to? Do I trust a seller more who has 10,000 happy customers or one who has 15 happy customers?

In the diamond earring auction above, I realized the price was low because I was buying from a relatively new seller on Ebay. He only had around 200 people he had sold to. Most of his customers had been happy with his service, but a few were upset. Nevertheless, I knew I had about a thousand dollars to spend, and I knew that Paypal at the time offered about that much in buyer assurance (ie, if a seller ripped you off, Paypal would pay you back). With that in mind, I decided to give the guy a shot. I figured that even if the guy was a bold-faced liar, I would get my money back.

The earrings came quickly, and I hurriedly opened them in excitement to try to gauge just how excited my wife would be to see them on our wedding day. As I held them up at an angle to the light to see them shimmer and shine, I was a bit dismayed. The seller had advertised them as VS2 (which means that they should be absolutely eye-clean; that is, I should not with my naked eye be able to see any blemishes in the stone), but I saw blemishes. One stone was pretty good, but the other was really bad and, in my unofficial opinion, should have been rated as an I (four gradings below VS2, and, therefore, much less expensive). As you can imagine, there was an angry phone call placed. Fortunately for me, the seller was willing to correct his "mistake" (though I suspect he likely ripped other people off who hadn't studied jewelry as much as I had), and he sent me rings that were closer to what had been advertised. You can imagine how excited I was when I took them to be appraised and I found that they were worth, conservatively, $2,400! Obviously, the reward in that situation very much overshadowed the risk.

5) Be Patient - Please note that I didn't just jump at the first diamond earring deal I found on Ebay. I would say I looked for two months before I came across that opportunity, but when I found it, I was so happy that I had waited. Similarly, if prices seem high for whatever you're looking for right now and you have the gift of patience, you can rest assured that you will be able to find a better deal in the future. If you know that you need to buy an expensive gift for someone, try to give yourself some time to find the right price for your budget.

Phew! That was a lot more than I had anticipated writing! In any case, I hope that you have found the above tips useful. If you have any questions, please leave me a comment.