"trading toledo" group on facebook

This is an incredibly entertaining FB group... The first post I saw was a girl offering her "massage services". A guy replied saying he would give her homemade laundry detergent in exchange for a good rub-n-tug. I don't know if the girl doesn't know what a rub-n-tug is or what but she seemed to agree to it... Wow.

Those guys are friends, and the female is a massage therapist :)

Anyway: interesting idea.

This is a great idea and I wish it a lot of success. But be aware that our "friendly" IRS tax man considers barter to be income (the bastards!).
"You must include in gross income in the year of receipt the fair market value of goods and services received in exchange for goods or services you provide. Generally, you report this income on Form 1040, Schedule C (PDF), Profit or Loss from Business."
http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html

So if I work for some old lady fixing her computer and she gives me a plate full of cookies I'm supposed to file that? My goodness that's messed up.

I would hope there are some limitations on this like if the value of the item is less than $100. To play the other side I can also see the reason for this. Say Google asks O-C to give them $2mil worth of fiber cable in exchange for 5 years free internet access. No money exchanged hands nor anything purchased.

Things like this are a big reason why I haven't started my own business. Even as a 1 person LLC, the overhead of managing all the tax codes, rules, laws to be compliant is so burdensome it's a job in itself.

pete, the nice thing about barter is there is no paper work :)

The only thing I would worry about, Nits, is that with such a public exposure as that Facebook web page has, the tax man will sit up and take notice of its members. THEN the audits begin. The tax guys are relentless. If you're going to barter, do it privately and without publicity. I do.