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.

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.

We scanned a photo of our son and took it to Wal Mart to have prints made. After waiting for the printing, the photo guy refused to sell us photos of our kid because he thinks they are copyrighted.

Technically speaking, they may be copyrighted by the studio that took the pictures (PDF explanation).

Great, technology gives us a way to get around monopolistic, anal rape pricing of photo studios, and big nanny Wal Mart just puts up another roadblock.

Thanks a lot, Wal Mart! And thanks a lot to the fat cat politicians whose laws lock up copyrights on photos of our children for up to 120 years, decades beyond our natural lifespans.

Plan:

1. Only use studios that will give us copyright releases or learn how to do our own photos.
2. Use photo centers besides Wal Mart.
3. Urge my Congressmen to reform excessive copyright privileges.

Sure, gas may be cheaper than other liquids (per http://www.cockeyed.com/science/gallon/liquid.html), but do you swill other liquids as quickly as gas?

The bonehead who does the Frisco to downtown Dallas commute in his 15 MPG SUV swills 4 gallons of gas daily. That’s $8 per day at $2 per gallon.

On a typical day do you consume $8 of any other fluid?

We have pretty much decided on getting a Nissan Maxima. Mmmm, 255 horses. We want a model with cloth seats and without a sun roof.

Yesterday we found a 2002 Maxima with 56K miles (the one pictured to the right). www.autocheck.com showed a clean title history, and a VIN lookup on www.publicdata.com showed that the previous owner lives in Plano and bought the car new. I found this guy’s phone number but am still not able to reach him.

Anyway, we took the car home for the night. After getting an uncle to help us examine everything, we discovered that parts of the front and rear bumpers are resprayed, and the rear bumper even has a slight wrinkle in one spot. Since much of the original paint was still there, whatever happened may not have been too severe. However, the repaint was done at a really crappy shop. They sprayed the paint in a moist and dirty environment: there was a place where the paint “fell” a bit, and the paint was full of trash. Because of the apparent crappiness, I have to wonder what else wasn’t fixed right.

An under-engine rock shield is also missing, exposing the underside–especially the A/C compressor and hoses–to kicked up junk. True, this isn’t a big deal; a new shield can be bolted in. But why was it missing in the first place? What caused it to fall off? The same event that damaged the bumpers? What else has fallen off? What else was not properly repaired?

Overall, these are not deal-ending issues, but they reduce what we’re willing to pay for the car. We got the car inspected at our local AAA-certified shop ($90), and it checked out fine. It may be mechanically sound. But I still can’t reach the original owner, so how do I know how it was treated or what it was used for?

Anyway, after a few minutes of back and forth at the dealer their best offer was 4.4% above our maximum price. 4.4% is a nontrivial amount of cash, so we walked. Of course we got the crap about how they won’t make enough money, here is what Kelly Blue Book says, etc.

We walked.

Back to square 1, less $90 and a half day of vacation. It’s a learning experience. I won’t be so quick to drive the next car home unless we have a good idea of what we would pay for it.

I reran the numbers on Buying a new car is a poor financial decision assuming 250,000 usable miles. The numbers more dramatically favor used cars:

Today I thought more about my views of car buying. I came up with the following as a response to someone who suggested that if you’re going to hold on to a car for 10 years, it’s smartest to buy new. In fact, it’s probably smartest to buy used regardless of your time horizon.

According to http://www.bankrate.com/brm/news/auto/20011226a.asp, a typical new car loses 15%-20% of its value each year in the first three years.

Let’s take the case of a Honda Accord LX V6. Based on friends’ experiences and Consumer Reports reliability ratings going back to 1996, I think it’s reasonable to say that this car will go at least 180,000 miles before requiring costly repairs or becoming unacceptably unreliable.

This chart is based on if you purchased the following cars right now:

It should be noted that Accords both are in demand, limiting your ability to negotiate, and don’t depreciate as badly as many other cars.

Notice how much higher you pay per useful mile for the new car than for the 4-year-old car.

Look at this differently: suppose I had $23,800 sitting around. What is the smartest investment: $23,800 all sunk into a car, or $12,650 sunk into a car and investing the remaining $11,000 in something useful and wise such as a child’s college fund, your own retirement, a worthwhile charity? Or if I didn’t have the cash laying around, why double my debt for the sole point of the new car smell? What does it say about one’s values when he maximizes his deprecation losses (and debt?) at the expense of better choices?

See http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Savinganddebt/Saveonacar/P37267.asp another perspective.

Cars are depreciating assets, or a net liability. It makes sense for careful buyers to reduce exposure to losses by not buying new.

My understanding of the Wright and Shelby amendments, which regulate air travel out of Dallas’s Love Field airport, was incorrect. Even the Dallas Morning News has it incorrect!

According to a 1998 US DOT news release, it appears that the 1979 Wright Amendment permits passenger air travel from Love Field, partially upending a then-11 year old agreement between Dallas and Ft. Worth. Under this agreement, Dallas and Ft. Worth will not use their respective airports to compete against DFW Airport. The 1997 Shelby Amendment enhances the Wright Amendment’s permissiveness by allowing flights to go to 3 more states and also allowing no destination restrictions on flights using planes with fewer than 56 seats. (It is humorous to note that Senator Richard Shelby, the amendment’s namesake, is from Alabama, one of these 3 additional states.)

So without the federal Wright or Shelby Amendments, there may be no passenger air travel out of Dallas Love Field.

Edit: See the comment left in the comments section below. (Click on the Comments link.) Simply repealing the Wright Amendment is not enough; that would invite another round of local lawsuits from Fort Worth, American Airlines, and DFW. Congress needs to clearly say that there shall be no restrictions on flights on Love Field.

A few years ago I read The Millionaire Next Door (see chapter 1). I was fascinated by this book. It showed that, in general, the people who act rich are not rich, and the rich usually don’t “act rich.”

A good measure of wealth is how long could you survive without changing your lifestyle or taking out additional debt if your income was cut off today. By that measure, an amazingly high percentage of those people living in your area’s silk stockings district are fakes. They are consuming so much of their income that their net worth is a fraction of what it should be had they been responsible.

I also read part of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That book was such hooey crap that I didn’t even finish it. A good analysis of the book and its author is at http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html. I think this guy is practically a fraud.