New Canadian Law For Coin Sellers.

Shoulda sold in the U.S. I've seen and and have known a few that don't bother with paperwork, yet one can still get in trouble.

Thanks for the info. Muchly appreciated.

Australian Law is much the same. In this case the sale price for capital gains tax purposes has to be more than $100. If it is, you must account for the capital gain, and pay the tax.

That is why most of my coins are purchased for much less than $100.

If you sell a valuable coin at auction, capital gains tax, goods and services tax (GST), sellers fees, and tax on that (indirectly) has to be paid. The indirect tax is that levied on the auctioneer, because he has to pay his business taxes, and they are costed onto his clients. That is four extra costs levied on the seller, three of those are taxes.

I'm not entirely sure what your question means... "what's the point....going to be taxed on it"? Your income is always taxed. How you generate income can be from buying and selling stuff or from going to work, but income is taxed. The difference here... if your business it buying and selling coins, then it's business profit, if you occasionally buy and sell coins/bullion, then it's capitol gains.

You're taxed on the difference, not on the entire sale. If you didn't keep your receipts to show what you paid for something and then get audited, then the "difference" is the entire amount.

The source of revenue to acquire isn't the point here really. But if you want to put it that way...

If you buy stock with after tax income, you need to declare gains and or losses when you sell it. You keep the paperwork and file your taxes accordingly. The same applies to pretty much anything, if you sell a coin collection and it brings in 20K in sales revenue, then you need to declare the difference in what you paid and what you sold it for. If you are audited and can't prove what you paid, then the whole sale is taxable income under that audit.

But let me suggest this... if you bought a gold round privately and paid cash and sold the gold round privately for cash, who exactly is going to know?

There's only a trail when you use commercial venues and bank accounts, electronic transactions.

I do declare my sales, but I'm careful. My coin assets are in a corp and I defer the taxes until such time as I pull profit from the corp which I only do in years when my main income is low as possible. I put all traceable sales or purchases through the corp and I keep it below the GST collection threshold.

Anyhow, I'm not handing out tax advice and the tax law around personal property sales are convoluted. Really , if this is a hobby for you you and not a profit venue, then don't volunteer anything to the tax guy. But if you suddenly dump 20K of coins on a dealer, do expect to claim it as income.

I only got into this mess because everyone who had a collection with one pretty coin I ended buying it all and needed a way to manage it financially. My wife is a chartered accountant with a public accounting license so I don't pay to manage any of this. Thankfully.

And I'm not a dealer... I primarily collect and upgrade my own coins, but some of those coins are damned expensive and I end up turning a small profit on it just because of how long it takes me to dispose of what I don't want. Really it's just inflation getting me half the time. I'm still selling coins I bought in the 80's fer crying out loud...

Anyone looking for 40K nickels? Sigh...

I'm talking about a 20K sale, you're splitting the hair on the 1K margin, which would be ignored for all intents and purposes during an audit. The tax on that capitol gain in the 1-2K margin wouldn't pay for the audit. They basically ignore that.

There are triggers in place but they do change, I never know what the threshold is and I once worked on that software back when my name was Pretty.

This explains something that's been puzzling me. I've recently been selling scrap silver to a place in Winnipeg that was offering 18 x face ( at the time). I was sending it to Winnipeg from Ontario because the local buyer was only offering 12 x face. After reading this I'm beginning to wonder if this local guy is doing an "under the table" sort of deal, that would explain the huge difference in price.

I am wondering 'what if' you had perhaps 5000 coins which have been purchased over say, 30 years, and where the vast majority of them may have cost you $20 or less each, and you would not have kept any receipts for those lower value coins. Some of those coins may be worth $hundreds at the time of sale.

You have no record of how much you have purchased the majority of them them for, and have no way of accounting for inflation which must be taken into account when assessing nett capital gain. Yet, legally, the taxation authorities are in a position to demand all of this information for each coin.

For each coin the original purchase price has to be known, the sold price has to be known, and the gross capital gain is the difference. The inflation rate over the time of ownership has to be taken into account, and deducted of the gross capital gain. The nett capital gain is then added to your taxable income and taxed at your marginal rate.

All very simple, really. Problem: you have to repeat the process 5000 times for each coin. And with self assessment of your own income under Australian taxation Law, you are compelled to supply all of that information if required by the taxation authorities. If not, they assess for you at very heavy penalty for infringement of the Law.