📦 Sold stuff on eBay? Here’s the deal.

Congratulations, you’ve reached the age where the IRS finally wants its cut of all those decades of tax-deferred saving. A Required Minimum Distribution is the amount you’re forced to pull out of your traditional IRAs and 401(k)s each year starting at 73. The government let that money grow untaxed for forty years on the polite understanding that eventually you’d take it out and pay up. Eventually is now.

The amount is calculated by dividing your account balance from December 31 of last year by a life-expectancy factor the IRS publishes in a table. For most 73-year-olds, the first RMD lands somewhere around 3.8% of the balance. Your plan administrator will usually run the math for you, but the responsibility for actually taking it is yours.

Your first RMD has a special deadline and that is April 1 of the year after you turn 73. Every RMD after that is due December 31. Delay the first one to April and you’ll take two distributions in the same calendar year, which can shove you into a higher bracket. Sometimes it’s smarter to just take it by December of the year you turn 73.

Miss it entirely and the penalty used to be a brutal 50% of the amount you should’ve withdrawn. The SECURE 2.0 Act knocked that down to 25%, and if you catch it and correct it within two years, it drops to 10%. Still painful. So set a reminder, or three.

Honestly, it depends on what you sold and why, and the rules around the paperwork have been changing so often that even the IRS seems tired.

If you sold personal items for less than you paid for them, you owe nothing. Unloading your old Peloton for $400 when you bought it for $1,500 is a loss, and the IRS doesn’t tax losses on personal stuff.

If you sold something for more than you paid — a collectible, a rare find, anything that appreciated — that gain is taxable. And if you’re buying things specifically to resell at a profit, that’s a business, and the whole net profit is taxable plus self-employment tax.

The chaos has been about the 1099-K, the form platforms send when you cross a payment threshold. The number has bounced around for years, but for 2025 it’s settled back to where it was before all the drama. Platforms only have to send you a 1099-K if you took in more than $20,000 and had more than 200 transactions. Both have to be true, so most casual sellers won’t get one at all. The form itself is just a paperwork trigger. It doesn’t decide what’s taxable. The underlying rule about losses, gains, and businesses applies whether you get a form or not.

Keep a rough record of what you paid for items you sell. A photo of an old receipt, a note in your phone, anything that establishes original cost. If a 1099-K shows up and most of your sales were personal items at a loss, you can report the gross on Schedule 1 and back it out as a non-taxable sale. Annoying, but defensible.

Every Thursday, we go to work.

The TaxStache Business Edition breaks down the tax and finance topics that actually matter for business owners, from quick intros to full deep dives. Plus book, podcast, and video recs to keep you sharp, and a weekly download you can put to use right away.

If you own a business (or you’re building one), this one’s for you.

You’re in good company. A huge share of new business owners do exactly this for the first year or two, then realize at tax time that they’ve created a forensic accounting project for themselves. The good news is it’s fixable. The better news is you’re catching it in May, not the following March.

The risk isn’t that mixing expenses is illegal. It isn’t. The risk is that it makes your records sloppy enough to lose legitimate deductions because you can’t prove what was business and what was a Target run. And if you’re ever audited, commingled accounts are the first thing the IRS uses to argue your business isn’t really a business, which can put deductions, and sometimes the entity itself, on shakier ground.

To clean up what’s already happened: pull your statements, highlight the business charges, and build a simple spreadsheet with date, vendor, amount, and what it was for. Keep digital receipts where you can. You don’t have to refile anything. You just need a defensible record at year-end.

Going forward, the fix is almost embarrassingly simple. Open a separate business checking account and a dedicated card. They don’t have to be fancy or business-branded; a second personal card used only for business is fine if you’re a sole prop. Then run every business expense through that card, every personal expense through the other, and never mix them. Your future self, and your tax preparer, will send flowers.

Mixing business and personal expenses is how innocent people end up doing an autopsy on their own bank statements. The cure is embarrassingly simple: a separate checking account. SuperMoney finds the best ones — no fees, no nonsense.

👉 Compare checking accounts