Aren Cambre’s Blog

Here is what I do to make the most money for my items on eBay:

• Use the 10 day auction. For only $0.20 more, it’s worth it to give buyers a few more days to bid on your auction.
• Start the auction at $0.01. Starting low means you’ll get more bids as initial bidders nickel and dime the auction up to a reasonable starting amount. An auction with more bids appears exciting and attracts more visits. Do not worry about the final price: if your item is really worth anything, and you described it well, it will garner a fair price by auction close. Only use a higher starting price if your item is truly one of a kind, prospective buyers are rare, and final selling prices on prior auctions are inconsistent. (Chances are exceedingly high that nothing sold by a reader of this blog is “one of a kind.”) A preferable alternative to a high starting price is a reserve price. What this means is that if the final auction value does not meet or exceed the reserve price, the auction is not binding.
• Only charge actual shipping costs. Sellers who pad shipping expenses are dishonest imbeciles. Furthermore, buyers will gravitate towards sellers who have cheap shipping. (If you don’t believe that, consider that Amazon.com does not charge shipping on orders above $25. What effect does that have on their sales?) Charge only what it costs to ship the item, and do not charge any “handling” costs unless this item’s shipping procedure is highly unusual. Provide shipping materials gratis. (This requires prior planning on your part: grab discarded boxes from work, save packing materials, buy when the are on sale, etc.) eBay has a handy feature where if you provide the dimensions and weight of the item beforehand, buyers can see the exact cost to ship the item to their door. This leads me to…
• Package the item beforehand. First, this gives you an opportunity to weigh the item. That way you can really know what it will cost to mail the item. Packaging adds weight; I’ve lost money on more than one auction when I failed to consider this. Second, what happens if you sell the item, receive payment, need to ship it the next day, but have no packaging? You have to make an expensive trip to the local office supply place and purchase packaging at full retail. What a great way to eliminate your profits! Had you prepared in advance, you may have been able to acquire boxes and packaging for free or cheap.
• Give a detailed, concise, and straightforward description. List all technical details about the item, accurately describe its condition, and be honest and open about defects. Do not use lots of fonts, colors, graphics, or other distracting junk. Keep the auction plain and readable. Your item will sell itself if you described it accurately.
• Do not be a used car salesman. Do not pad your description with chintzy text, graphics, or other crap. For example, “one of a kind,” “extra special,” “can’t miss,” etc. Give me a break. Do you want to make yourself look like a dishonest moron used car salesman? Nobody likes those retards anyway, so don’t shoot yourself in the foot by emulating those asses.
• Lots and lots of good pictures. Include many detailed photos. Give close-ups of problem spots and good spots. Do not use fuzzy shots or ambiguous shots (for example, poor lighting that prevents the user from seeing the item properly). I can’t tell you how many car listings I have seen that probably would have gotten higher final auction values if the photos weren’t horrible. If you screwed up the shot, 1. get off your lazy ass and retake it, and 2. learn how not to make the same mistake in the future.
• Have a good feedback rating. I recommend a rating of at least 15 positives with no neutrals or negatives. Otherwise you will have a puny track record. Sellers with minimal, zero, or negative feedback often get horrible final auction values. You may need to make some purchases to get positive feedback.
• Be honest, be honest, be honest. Dishonesty will hurt your feedback rating, and long-term it will just cause more headaches than it’s worth. Don’t be like eDrop of Wichita  (additional link).
• Use PayPal. PayPal has steep fees, but it’s much easier for buyers to pay you if you use PayPal. Look at it this way: if you didn’t use PayPal and eBay, would you have been able to sell the item in the first place? And if you were able to sell the item (probably at a garage sale), would you have gotten this much?

With these tactics, I have had many surprisingly lucrative auctions. I’ve sold a broken Holley carburetor for $150 (the problem was accurately described), a Testors model for $80, and two new PDAs at a slight profit.

Companies keep asking me if I want to convert to electronic delivery of my bills and statements. The funny thing is that almost none of these companies retain more than six months of my records online.

What would I do if I needed to verify payment of a bill more than six months ago? (This recently happened.) Had I only done electronic payment, then I would have to pay this company more money to get a copy of the statement.

Whatever. Until companies get a clue, I will continue to get hardcopies of all my bills.

I am looking for an excellent condition four door ‘73-’79 Chevrolet Nova or clone (Buick Apollo, Buick Skylark, Pontiac Ventura, Pontiac Phoenix, or Oldsmobile Omega). Email me at aren@cambre.biz if you know of one for sale.

On Tuesday I re-organized something called the Scout Locker. It’s a collection of used Scout uniforms that the White Rock District sells to kids who otherwise could not afford Boy Scout uniforms.

The Scout Locker used to be at a spare building at White Rock United Methodist Church, a big supporter of Scouting. This building developed roof leaks, so the clothing was tossed into boxes and moved to a different location.

BSA uniforms happen to be expensive. A normal uniform set for a boy (uniform shirt, shorts, belt, and socks) is $77.95. The same stuff sized for an adult is $83.70. This doesn’t even include the patches or epaulets, each of which are sold separately. And an optional cap is $11.50. See the prices for yourself at the online Scout Catalog.

As a side note, sometimes I wonder if the BSA is excessively profiting on uniform parts. It sure seems contrary to the ninth point of the Scout Law, Thrifty, for this clothing to be so expensive. I wish the BSA could just sell this stuff at cost.

As I was putting everything together I found that we have a ton of Boy Scout shorts and a paucity of everything else: no Cub Scout uniform shirts, only two pairs of Cub Scout shorts, and few Boy Scout uniform shirts.

Fortunately we have a limited amount of funds available to acquire some additional uniform pieces. I am going to strike a deal with a guy to purchase a bulk quantity of Cub Scout uniform parts. Hopefully after that we will have a good deal of uniform parts for area needy children.

I think I am finally over the RSV virus. Here is how it went.

Day 1: Sore/swollen throat.
Day 2: Sore/swollen throat.
Day 3: Sore/swollen throat.
Day 4: Sore/swollen throat and coughing.
Day 5: Coughing progressing to full blown cold by evening.
Day 6: Full blown cold.
Day 7: Full blown cold progressing to lots of lung mucus.
Day 8: Blowing gallons and gallons of lung mucus out my nose.
Day 9: Same. I constantly sense an intense smell of lung snot.
Day 10: Same.
Day 11 through Day 14: Lung mucus slowly tapering off.

This really screwed up my Christmas break!

This was my Christmas Day dinner dessert:

Blue Bell Natural Vanilla Bean ice cream plus Hershey’s Special Dark chocolate syrup.

Logically a “dark chocolate” substance would have less sugar than a normal chocolate substance, right? Wrong. According to Hershey’s nutrition chart, the Special Dark syrup is 65% sugar, whereas the normal is only 62% sugar.

Amazing.

I think the syrup’s “dark” flavor is mostly fake, anyway. Next time I will just buy the regular syrup.

It seems that our kid has picked up a virus from the church nursery nearly every week this fall. We’ve had colds, stomach viruses, and now we have the “mother of all colds”: RSV.

This RSV is one of the worst colds I have ever had. My son is nearly over it, but the doctor says we shouldn’t bring him back to the nursery for 3 more days. My wife is nearly over it, and I am in the middle of it.

Almost all kids get this virus by the time they turn 2, and later reinfections are supposedly less severe.

Hopefully I’ll be over this soon. I hate being trapped at home during my Christmas break. There is a lot of household work I wanted to do these next few days.

Amelia the Cat and I agreed to try to work out our relationship again. If I scoop out her litter every day or two, she agreed to try not to poop around the house anymore.

A truism: health care providers are quick to overcharge, slow to refund.

This week I learned six lessons to help deal with this:

1. Pay as little as you can when you leave the provider. This may not work at a doctor’s office because the bill is cut and dried. But hospitalizations are different. Before you leave the hospital, the friendly hospital extortionist comes by to get as much out of you as he can. Pay the absolute minimum you can possibly pay. It’s better to get a bill later–after the claim with insurance is settled–than it is to overpay and fight for a refund.
2. Don’t pay another cent until the claim is settled. That’s right, until you have the hot little explanation of benefit (EOB) in your hands, don’t pay another cent except under duress.
3. Only pay what the EOB says you owe. The EOBs should show exactly what the service provider billed your insurance, any discounts, what your insurer paid, and what you owe. On my insurance, what I owe is the sum of the “deductible” and “copay” fields. Sometimes there are also “non-covered charges.” Do not assume you have to pay the non-covered charges. See the next section.
4. Question non-covered charges. Sometimes non-covered charges are billing errors. One of my EOBs for a doctor’s visit had $160 of non-covered charges. It turns out that the doctor miscoded two items. Had I not caught this, I would have owed my doctor all that money. An example legitimate non-covered charge that you would have to pay could be a hospital room upgrade, such as a private room versus a shared room.
5. Double-check that you actually paid what the EOB says you owe. I printed out every medical payment for the past year and found a corresponding EOB for payment. By double-checking all of this, I have found that I am owed several hundreds of dollars.
6. If you are owed money, be persistent. None of the five medical care providers I have dealt with this year have voluntarily refunded a single cent I am owed. In fact, had I not called their case about it, one provider would have permanently sat on $500 it owes me. (It was a really dumb billing mistake: one line item was entered twice.) Take careful notes on each call, and be prepared to speak to several people before you get everything resolved.

Attention to detail can easily save you a ton of money. I’m on track for recovering a few hundred dollars for 2004.

Kitty and I are on a trial separation.

For the next few days she will live in a special resort, pictured at right. While she’s at that resort she will either learn that it’s OK to use the litter box, even if it’s not exactly how she wants it, or she will find a new home.

Pooping all over my house is no longer acceptable.

She has a tough choice to make.