Haida Eye Stickers for your kayak.All this time I have refused offers to commercialize the site, or even to put in links to other pages that seemed too commercial. So I started a separate WEB site that for a while sold those Haida Eye stickers (my own design), email addresses, emergency survival bandannas, calendars and books. Selling anything in California turns out to be a pain in the butt because every county principality has had a special sales tax passed and calculating what to charge is difficult. The hassle this added to my taxes at the end of the ear was more trouble than the typical $30 a year I made in gross sales.
Then someone (The State Board of Equalization? The IRS? PayPal?) ratted out to my local county bureaucracy that I was running a home business. If I was running a home business, I have to pay business taxes on my business property! The county started sending me a form every year asking how much business property I owned. I filled out the form with $0 in every slot, wrote them a note that this was a home, not a business and sent it back to them. This worked for a few years, but then they sent me a bill: If you are running a home office and you do not fill out enough on those forms, then they estimate it for you. For an internet home buisiness they estimate that you must have a computer worth $3000.00, a desk worth $400.00 and a chair worth $50. For business taxes, you pay 10% of the value of the property every year forever. That is $35 this year, $5 more than the maximum amount of gross sales I ever made in one year. You are guilty of having this business property unless you can prove otherwise.
One way to prove you are innocent is to let the county have a copy of your income tax returns for the last 5 years so that they can go on a fishing expedition and look for other things to tax you for. My brother Paul, who has a consulting business at home, dealt with this by going to the thrift store and buying a desk and a chair for $10, then buying a used computer for $50. Every year when the county says "we don't believe you only have $60 of business property, we estimate you have $3500 in property", he sends them copies of the receipts. He takes some satisfaction that the county probably spends over $100 a year in internal costs to pry a $6 check out of him. My solution was to officially close the business. The county then wanted to know how much I sold the business for, so they could tax that. But after a few years they stopped bugging me.
I also had reserved several domain names, oceankayaker.com and oceankayaker.net from the Network Solutions registrar. Unlike every other technology company where the cost goes down as the industry matures, Network Solutions’ prices kept going up. They started out at $19.95 a year and crept up to $39.95 a year. For a while they offered a discount if you paid for multiple years at a time. Then that discount got smaller and smaller until it amounted to a savings of $2.50 for a 5 year period. So I let some of my less important domain names go, like oceankayaker.com. Someone snatched it up and they are now offering to sell it back to me for $2000! As the rest of my domain names get close to renewal, I move them over to a more reasonable registration service where I pay a quarter as much per year.
A few people found links to this page after the official close of the business. If they were from California and sent me money, I told PayPal to refund it. Then I sent them stickers anyway. It is just not worth the effort to do business in California. If they lived in other states, I kept the money and sent them their stickers. I added $30 to my miscellaneous income every year to keep the IRS off my back. I still have a small pile of those Haida Eye stickers left. If you read this far, there is a reward: If you can figure out what my email address is and contact me, and I still have any left, I'll send you two of them free.