Government steals from me every day.Go get on their case Mr. perfect.dont you have to go milk a donkey or something?

Seems like you ride a very tall horse!

Chris

At one time in my life when I did landscaping for a living, I had a regular customer who turned out to be a Chiropractor, and a good one at that.
He found out that I had back problems and offered to treat me in exchange for partial payment of landscaping work. I jumped at that opportunity.Great trade I thought. Turned out o be a viscous cycle of work induced pain followed by endless treatment. Fortunately I got out of the landscaping business.

I enjoy bartering. I think it is actually a good skill to have. Usually it is an even trade of some sort. If the world ever goes upside down which I don't think it will in my lifetime.(But I'm old) it will be the way business is done.

I own a tree service and last year I trimmed two large maples for a farmer for a 800# Angus steer, I would have normally charged $500 to do the trees, but when he offered the steer I was more tban happy to trade out. We've been eating good since January

We have a little 5 acre field on our property. Our neighbor grows corn on it and in return he plants and leaves a half acre of soy beans for wildlife.
We do not exchange any money, never have. If we get more snow than I can handle he will be here with a big tractor and clean things up.
We have him and his wife over a couple times a year for a nice supper. They take care of our chickens and outdoor wood boiler when we are out of town.
We help them as needed. It is very nice to have a neighbor a mile away that you can trust with anything. Not so common place anymore.

Zim

I barter all the time...for anything. Made some pretty good deals. Been screwed once or twice too but that’s the game. Used to trade vehicles a lot..hot rod/custom parts etc. made a lot of great deals. Been trading for traps lately and have scored many users up here in AK...I’d say a couple hundred traps in the few years we’ve been here. I don’t know why but trading gets me all excited...like gambling.

LOL !!!

I read a article a few days ago about California hiring more technocrats to start going after the ninety to one hundred and thirty Billion a year in black market money transactions they are not getting taxes on. I would guess that most of that market is done by illegal immigrants and their employers, l have to wonder if California will give them an exemption.? I have already talked to one person that has figured it will cost his business 18 thousand a year. He figures that is more than enough to finance a move to another state.

Not a lot of bartering but increasing as of late. Helping bale some hay for a guy I buy from and we trade sweat for hay. I also barter several quarts of maple syrup we make for items that others have, such as some veggies, straw, plowing a garden etc. Doing some limited ADC work gets some permissions as well.

Bryce

What a rude and asinine question.

And can we presume you legally trapped, hunted and tagged all the wildlife you took and paid taxes on all your earnings from trapping, correct?

Keith

And can we presume you declared all this on your taxes, correct?

Keith

As I read the comments an old family story came to my mind. My grandmother had two brothers that were the doctors in the this area for years. My grandma and grandpa were farmers and not rich by todays standards. Both of the doctors were well-to-do. One got cleaned out on Black Tuesday in '29. He came out $2500 in the hole. He was about to lose his house and farm. My grandma and grandpa were simple hard working farmers. She had saved egg and cream money buried in the back yard for years. She loaned my great uncle the $2500 he needed to satisfy the collectors.
Paying her back would have been relatively easy in normal times. But none of his patients had any money. He was bound by his oath to help the poor sick folks. The only pay they had was mostly fruits, vegetables and chickens all of which he and my grandma already had. Fortunately her love for her brother was more than the money. As times got better he repaid her every cent and even delivered two of my sisters, which was perhaps interest.

Determining the worth of items in a barter depends on demand for the product and the timing of the deal. A cup of cold water is worth more in a desert than in a fountain by the lake side. A free market in which people get to decide a commodities or services values is part of the foundation of our Great Constitutional Republic. Trading apples for services is not a fair market when only two people are involved, it becomes more of a free market when an exchange is set up so people are able to make the market liquid. Thus a scalper is able to maintain liquidity while trying to make a profit for his services. That helps do away with the confined use of scrip and keeps the market free. When people can park their investment in something like money that is backed by something like gold or silver, then people can have a certainty their world won't collapse around them. Trading apples for bit coin or fiat money is trade just based on the whim of what someone thinks a pie in the sky is worth.

Barter is not only a forgotten practice but an untaught practice. The basics of free enterprise is not taught as a general curriculum.

We can rest assured that in the end there will be a judgment and the exactor will be there also.

So when does it become alright to just go around questioning other people's honesty?

You should take the advice you gave on another thread and be less hypocritical.




Keith

I think I agree with what Pike River said.
I am a little confused on all this talk about bartering and tax law.
Let me give an explain why.
I own a car and it breaks down and needs repaired, so I trade it for a horse that I think is worth as much or more than the car is to me. My question is where do I put it on my income tax form. It is not wages because I am not working and getting paid for the horse. It is not a business profit or loss because I am neither a car dealer or a horse trader. I owned the car and traded it off for what I and the back yard mechanic who I traded it to for what we thought was of equal value to each of us. So where is the profit or loss even if I were a car dealer or horse trader?
To me that is like me needing to report to the government a trade I made yesterday when I gave a friend 2 - $5 bills and a $10 bill for his $20 dollar bill. That I think is exchanging one item for another of equal value and is not anything that needs reported to the government since it is neither wages, interest or a business profit or loss for either me or the guy I traded with. {Come to think of it my wife never gave me the $20. LOL}

I am not sure where someone is being even a little dishonest because they do not report all barters or trades they make.
One more example of what I did last week.
I went to the local salvage yard and got 4 or 5 scrap pieces of square tubing to use to make some heavy duty wolf swivels. I ask the foreman "how much?" and he told me "Don't worry about it. Next time you come in bring some scrap iron about the same weight." So I will take some old brake rotors in for the exchange. So I guess I am still bartering and I hope I am not breaking some government law by not reporting it.
Pete

Love to barter. The latest was a farmer that lets me trap called and asked if I would trap a couple woodchucks for him, I said sure. I thought since he lets me and my grandson have fun no problem. Last week I called and asked if he had any straw and where should I leave the money, he said trade for professional trapping services!
I used the straw for a hay ride for my daughters and grandkids last Friday and they had a blast.....Tax that!

You would record it on a schedule C as if you're a sole prop. Add up all the tomatoes, horses and mechanic work you received as your gross revenue then deduct all the ADC, tree trimming and pelts you bartered for them as your expenses and if you're like most you'll come out at a profit of about $0.00

that was how I did the math equal value exchange no profit is made no profit to tax.

Side bar from the discussion about ethics and all. Lol. When I lived in Washington i traded a nice riding mower for a fishing boat. No big deal i thought. I went the the courthouse to get the boat titled and they asked how i purchased it. Thinking i will just be legit about this and tell the truth and said i traded a lawnmower for it. I was told that you cannot trade "unlike" items. Meaning if i got a boat i needed to trade a boat. In turn what i was told i had to do was create a bill of sale for market price for each items and claim each of them as purchases and pay taxes on those items. Needless to say I had to have that explained to me a few different times and still didn't understand how it wasn't the state filing false documentation to claim taxes. After all of this I drew up the fraudulent paperwork and stated that i paid an imaginary $250 for the boat. Then i was told that I was going to have to pay taxes on fair market value not the imaginary number they told me to create. When it was all said and done i never did get tags for the boat. I ended up selling it for cash and creating an actual bill of sale for another boat and was able to get tags in minutes. One of the main reasons why i left Washington.