I bought a phone on eBay last month. The seller insured it with USPS. When the phone arrived with a cracked screen (the listing had photos of a not-cracked screen) I photographed the damage and submitted a return request with eBay. The seller then filed an insurance claim with USPS.
USPS sent me a letter, requiring me to present the damaged package (and its contents) to my local postmaster. I documented this to the seller via eBay, but complied with the government authority -- I didn't want the seller to lose his insurance claim because I didn't comply. The postmaster kept the package, saying it was a requirement.
Once the phone was out of my hands, the seller denied the return, keeping my money, while presumably keeping the money from the USPS insurance claim.
I've come to the conclusion that anything under about $500 isn't worth trying to sell online anymore. eBay has eroded as a marketplace for sellers.
For anything higher value, I have hobbyist forums I have 20 year memberships on where I can spend the time to due diligence individual buyers and transactions thoroughly. Even here I often don't get maximum dollars as I may have 3 offers and go with the person I am most comfortable transacting with.
And even on the higher end, it's easier to just do a trade in at a retailer instead of trying to extract maximum value doing business online.
On the lower end the problem is it's not worth the time to do the due diligence, and there are a tremendous number of time wasting tire kickers for lower value items. So I end up giving stuff away or just holding on to it, which is a shame.
> anything under about $500 isn't worth trying to sell online anymore
Anything under say $100 I'm fine selling on ebay because a) it's less likely to be scammed and b) even if it is, I don't care that much. Anything over that amount is only being sold in person on fb marketplace. Or, like you said, on a hobbyist forum.
I agree that ebay has completely eroded for sellers. It's basically a ship and be pleasantly surprised later situation.
I’ve gotten comfortable with selling things very cheap on Craigslist.
E.g. a $300 recliner I’d sell for $25 because no one will give you hassle about it, and at that price, you can pick from several buyers the one that is least likely to be a headache.
I was looking for a phone. Lots of sellers will list things as brand new which should imply new in box (unopened packaging). After you carefully read the listing, they actually mean open box which is far more variable.
Ebay does not care at all. It makes the search basically useless.
Which makes taking the time to send a letter have a lot of importance. I wrote a note to my mother and it meant a lot to her to get a hand written correspondence.
So never buy a gift card at a retail location, unless it’s digital. Preferably buy directly from the website of the company where th credit will be used.
But why would apple punish the secondary user of the card? That seems like the wrong person to punish.
I think if you believed 7-8% loans were normal, you might be more likely to bite the bullet and make your move.
But if you believe 3-4% is normal, then you’re probably waiting for rates to return to “normal.”
I think it’s a side effect of years of low interest rates… people are conditioned now to believe low is normal, and they want to hang on until we get back to that.
I was hoping rates would stay “high” for a while which I thought would soften the housing market so I could buy, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Instead of prices dropping, inventory just dried up.
Shows how silly I am for thinking I could time the market.
It's the other way around. If you think 3% is normal, you buy now and refinance while people think that the house is unaffordable. Remember that lower interest rates make home prices go even higher!
If you think it will stay at 7%, that 3% loan you already have is a treasure to keep using for a decade or two.
I would have agreed, but in reality, higher rates haven’t improved affordability.
Instead, high rates plus economic uncertainty has reduced supply significantly because no one wants to sell.
Maybe lower rates will make prices even more unaffordable, which would make this a low period by comparison, but if you look at home price to income numbers, they’re still near record highs.
Maybe it means: if you think the line is always going up and to the right, today is the best day to buy, but that’s a weird way for me to think of a house, which I still kind of see as a consumable good rather than an investment vehicle.
Yep, it's insane that people think 3% loans will magically fix the housing market. It's beyond delusional that they refuse to accept it accelerate home price increases and bidding wars.
Real estate market will soften as the economy comes off the rails [1]. 6-12 months from now should have more motivated sellers depending on market (foreclosures in Clark County Las Vegas market are up 32% year over year June 2025, for example [2]). Short sales and foreclosure auctions are also options. If you still want to buy down the road, be in the strongest financial position possible to get financing and make an offer when the market conditions turn more buyer favorable. Seller concessions can be used to buy down the mortgage rate, if that’s useful information.
Put in other words, in any market, there are bids and there are offers. Prices don't move until one side gets in a rush. A seller's market (like in 2021) is one where buyers are in a rush and will lift the offer. A buyer's market (like during GFC) is one where sellers are in a rush and will hit the bid.
The pressure on buyers, at least in the past couple of decades, is that the increase in the supply of housing has not been at all commensurate with the increase in population. That, combined with a great increase in the money supply, makes for tremendous upward pressure on real estate prices.
Sellers generally aren't in a rush except in times of economic crises, especially paired with a period of overleveraging running up to it; i.e. the GFC. Economic softening appears to be in the works at the moment, so buyers should get a little reprieve soon, but since there isn't the same overleveraged buyers all rushing for the exits like in 2008, a similar crash is unlikely.
The housing market won't soften until we build a shit ton of houses which will never happen until there are a lot of very angry people willing it into existence.
I don’t think we’re ever going to build houses again at the rate we did before the 2008 GFC. A substantial portion of people who work in construction are undocumented (and will be targeted for deportation by this admin for the remains of their term), zoning remains a challenge, cost of materials continues to inflate. How many years would it take to get back up to speed? 5? 10? What does the economy look like then? Will enough young folks go into the necessary trades to meet the demand for this labor? We might keep building along at the anemic pace of today, but I argue we’ll never build again at the rate we did pre GFC.
We don't build slow because the cost of labor or raw materials have gone up. In fact productivity and efficiency has gone up across the board in the past century. We build slower because there is a will to build slower. We let local people kill high speed rail, high voltage DC, and, above all, housing. You know how we built rails in the 1800s and highways in the 1900s? We didn't give a shit when someone said "no". That's what's changed.
Supply and demand for labor will work itself out- prices will go up, companies will invest in efficiency, etc. People just need time to figure out the details, and the legal right to do the job.
Indeed, that's my thesis, I appreciate you making it crystal clear. The pipeline has failed, and if there is a will to fix it, it will take time. Until it's sorted, year after year, there will be folks who go without affordable housing. There are, as you said, going to be losers from this policy failure.
There are lots of businesses eager to build houses. The trouble is overwhelmingly that we can't afford it. Angry people won't get it done unless they take up construction or manufacturing as a career in huge numbers, or else rob or enslave people who can build houses.
What we have is a general shortfall of prosperity. Housing is affected by money supply in an outsized way. Prices are at least partly going up because our economy is stagnant, and wages are going down in real terms as credit continues expanding to keep the wheels from coming off.
Reduction in childcare cost in my linked comment, not real estate. Unsure how you made such a connection. From that comment:
> It doesn't make sense if you need both incomes to survive. It just pushes the total fertility rate down faster when prospective parents realize they cannot afford childcare nor one parent to remain at home.
In the context of this thread, there are not enough houses for demand, that is why they are expensive, but if an administration beats on the economy hard enough, causing job destruction and increased unemployment, those who cannot continue to afford to service their mortgages will be forced to sell. This would contribute to real estate price softening. Child care costs will never come down (as I assert in my other comment) because the government refuses to subsidize it and there are labor shortages, with childcare providers unable to find staff for the childcare wages on offer. Labor shortages will persist well into the future due to prime working age population compression due to structural demographics. Citations for this are in my comment you linked to, but I can provide as many as you would like.
If you could get a lower price on the higher interest loan, you could pay it off early and save a lot of money. If you have a very high price with low interest, paying it off early has much less impact on the amount paid.
One likely significant factor is the Baumol effect. As mass-produced things get cheaper everything that requires a lot of manual labor gets relatively more and more expensive.
This is basically the Abbott baby formula shortage but for this other critical product. Instead of having a large market with more competition the US has its own special sausage.
As a motorcyclist, lane filtering also comes with some dangers. It's up to each motorcyclist to decide if it's worth it. I lane split in heavy traffic in CA but I'm also very wary about being the first vehicle into an intersection after a light changes. I see far more people running red lights around me than I do people rear ending stopped traffic at a light. I'm glad we have the option.
This is completely arbitrary Internet lore. Unless you have local laws that define the terms, they don't actually mean anything. Also, if you're "filtering", then you will, inevitably, find yourself "lane splitting" when the light turns green before you reach the front.
Filtering as a matter of habit eliminates the risk. That's OP's point, not that motorcyclists should watch their mirrors like a hawk and jump between lanes when they decide that the driver behind them might not stop.
If Reddit has taught me anything it’s that the huge number of new subscribers is probably a large amount of bot owner accounts trying to make accounts to age for later use. They just like to say “x million accounts created” with no due diligence behind the accounts.
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