I know the trend today is to tap this, click that, swipe this other thing, Paypal her. Anything but cash! The paranoid (or wiser) among us will say that the govt types want to eliminate cash so they can easily track everything we do at all times. Maybe yes, maybe no. To each his own.

In any case, don't overcomplicate things. If I don't know someone and am selling them an expensive pinball (or anything), I want cash and cash only. And I will be looking over the bills carefully to make sure all the holograms and strips are where they should be.

When you make the sale, keep the cash around the house somewhere. You can find a good place to put it so the casual burglar wont find it. Now the next time you buy a game, you will have most or maybe all of the cash you need.

If you deposit the cash in the bank, it sounds like the new laws may result in you getting a letter from the gov asking why you did not report the money as income. This was always true with large deposits, but will happen at significantly lower numbers now. This will require everyone to keep detailed records of what we bought, how much we paid, how much we put into it during repair if any, the selling price, and the profit or loss. This will be more than a little pain in the butt, needless to say. It will probably necessitate setting up a formal business if you sell more than a game or two a year, allowing lots of write offs on the plus side.

I took a deposit on a game with Paypal and Paypal reversed the charges OVER SIX MONTHS after I received the money!!! I was in the "right" and the buyer was in the "wrong" but it didn't matter to Paypal. NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER USE PAYPAL FOR ANYTHING!!!!!!

As I mentioned in another thread, Western Union seems to be fool proof. The buyer goes to their local office, gives them cash and your name, they wire it to you, and you go to your local WU office, show your id, and they give you the cash. In my case, the local WU office is in my supermarket, and they almost always have plenty of cash to pay you.

You don't have to wait for the funds to clear since the other guy paid cash. The funds are not deposited into your bank, nor are they secured by your credit card. As such it seems to me WU does not appear to have any way of getting the cash back from you if for instance the buyer is later found to have used counterfeit bills for example. There may be a way for someone to scam you with WU but I for the life of me can not find it.

The only hang up is the buyer has to be willing to pay you in full up front before you ship the pin, and that may be an issue in many cases. In my case, the guy trusted me more than I trusted him. LOL!

Structuring deposits gives the appearance that someone is trying to hide their activities and is therefore doing something wrong. In fact, depositing a large sum into your bank is not at all illegal, immoral or even fattening! But it might require more paperwork...

As an example, I bought a NIB AFM LE a while back and paid around $8800+ for it all in. A year or so later I sold it to a guy for $8500 cash. (Yeah, I know - if I had only waited...) If I had deposited that $8500 into my bank it might have required me to explain on my tax return where the 8500 came from. Then I might have had to supply receipts on both ends showing I actually sold the game at a $300+ loss. Not illegal and no tax due whatsoever, but a big pain in my butt. Plus who gets a written receipt from someone they sold a game to?

If I had broken the 8500 into several smaller deposits and anyone saw that, it would make me look shifty and might have resulted in even more questions. I don't need either kind of hassle! In my case, I just took the 8500 cash and bought another machine. Problem solved!!

That can't be scammed, hacked, or reversed?

HAHA! Yeah, but people don't always understand that the safe secure methods of payment are often just that!

True. So I would imaging most pinball collectors who accept some kind of electronic payment are going to have a huge bookkeeping job at the end of the year when they get their 1099's from every deal they made the past 12 months. Many/most collectors buy, sell or trade several games a year. Possibly dozens even if they are just collecting and not running a retail establishment. Certainly these will add up to a value of over $600!

Can you imaging how much work it will be to document exactly how much of every sale or trade is profit, how much was deductible because it went into repair, etc etc. When it was sold, who bought it, what was paid. Also, it will require us probably to get a written sales receipt from buyers although the 1099 might suffice in and of itself. It's going to be a paperwork nightmare if we use something other than cash.

At today's prices, 10k may only be one or two machines! LOL! The thing is, banks can report the 10k transaction, but that doesn't necessarily mean that any of it is profit. It could be a break even sale or even a loss. You have to add in cost of parts you bought and any repairs you might have paid to have done. At the end of the day, there may be little or no profit at all on many sales. The pain in the butt is we will now need to keep more detailed records for any deposited monies over 10k so we can justify if there was or wasn't any profit. I don't think verbal explanations are going to carry much weight if you actually get audited, absent printed receipts.

I usually try to buy games where I can get back most or all of my original investment when I sell. The proceeds then go into other game purchases. I could feasibly have thousands of dollars in sales in a year, with no or minimal profit. Seems like for those of us not millionaires or billionaires, there won't be much return for all of the work the govt puts in.