Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with sale and money

Average used iPod price tracker?

teg — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:43:17 -0800

Is there a website that tracks the average selling price of used items? I'm particularly interested in used iPod prices, but something more general would be nice too. The price they actually go for would be more helpful than the original asking price. All I've been able to find are paid services for eBay sellers, but they seem like overkill for my needs.

What is a fair price?

ubiquity — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:27:40 -0800

How do I assess the value of an offer I received for an investment I own? I own a tiny interest in some property which produces oil revenue — about $125 per quarter. I have been offered $2,140 for it. How can I assess the value of this offer? At 5% annually, the future value of $125 per quarter overtakes that of $2,140 in about five years, but I don't have a good feel for what that means in terms of the fairness of the offer. Obviously, if someone offered me more than $12,000 for the property, I'd take it, because the quarterly interest (again, at 5%) on $12,000 is $125. On the other hand, $125 is clearly too little, because I can get that much from my investment in a single quarter. So a good price is somewhere between $125 and $12,000. But where? If there are any good rules of thumb for dealing with this sort of problem, please tell me.

Should we pay this fee (UK)?

altolinguistic — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 03:13:55 -0800

Does anyone know anything about UK property law? Can they make us pay this? Conveyancer demanding small payment they should have asked us for a year ago. Background - my partner and I bought a house a year ago, and he sold his flat at the same time. As far as we were concerned, both sales were complete, we had moved in, and the buyer of the flat sold the flat on in March (we found this out by looking at an online property prices site).

A few weeks after we moved, our conveyancer sent a letter to us saying that a 'registration fee' of 0.05% of the sale price was owing to the management company that owns the freehold of the flat, and that this payment is 'traditionally made' by the vendor, and that my partner, as the vendor, therefore owes £51.25. As far as we were concerned the sale was complete, and 'tradition' is not an adequate reason for paying anyone anything, so we ignored the letter.

Fast forward to last week when we received a copy of the letter requesting payment, along with a cover letter asking quite nicely for the money. Then this week we received another letter from our conveyancer, sounding more worried this time, with a copy of a letter from the buyer's solicitor to our conveyancer containing the enlightening phrase 'With respect, you knew what payments were required from your clients prior to completion and this sum should have been retained by yourselves from your clients to cover these costs'.

So it looks like the conveyancers have made a mistake and are trying to recoup the money from us. What is our position? Should we pay? Are we obliged to pay? How should we approach the conveyancers? To be clear, this is in the UK, we don't seem (yet) to be under any threat of legal action if we don't pay this, and all letters so far have been civil.

Help me sell some knickers

ukdanae — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 02:57:48 -0800

I'm having a one-day lingerie sample sale in Edinburgh, and am really struggling to work out the best way to process credit cards on the day. I've set up my merchant account (streamline) and that's all great, but the actual Point of Sale terminal is driving me crazy. The standard solution for "mobile" retailers is a GPRS device, but the sale is taking place in a subterranean nightclub which will definitely not get a signal. That leaves me with traditional POS equipment - either a regular terminal, or one of those chunk-chunk carbon swipe things.

The bank offered that I could hire a terminal, but only with a 36-month contract (!) so i've been looking elsewhere for options. I'm also trying to find those carbon swipe machines like we had back in the day, but can't seem to source any.

Excepting eBay (i'm already looking there), would anyone know somewhere, anywhere in the UK that I could buy a used Ingenico Chip and Pin machine, and/or one of those credit card swipe machines? Bonus points if you can just tell me what the industry calls the carbon swipe machines. Help!

Money for Music

banished — Sat, 31 Jul 2004 06:46:03 -0800

I was explaining to a friend of mine how little music artists make. I've heard they sometimes only make pennies on every CD that is sold. Are there any graphs or charts, (a pie chart would be ideal) on the internet that show where the money would go from the sale of a CD and who pockets what? It seems like something simple that someone should have figured out and put together, but Google is failing me.