I’m no expert, but I do think you will be ok as you appear to be a collector rather than trader.
You can check your total sales on eBay by the way by filtering your sales for “this year”. It gives you both the number and value of sales.
As I understand it, you collect old locks which you find interesting and this is something you have done for years?
Therefore you can legitimately say you buy locks for your collection, keep them a while then sell them on. Sometimes you make a little bit on them, sometimes you don’t right?
HMRC say that providing you buy something and keep it long enough to derive pleasure of ownership before selling it on then you are a private seller just selling your personal items and not a trader who is purely buying to sell and therefore turning over items more quickly.
The typical ownership period they use to measure this is 6 months.
In addition to this, you are perfectly entitled to sell your (and your mums) personal household items that you no longer need, want etc.
Unless you’ve sold several thousand pounds worth of your collection, chances are you will not hear anything from HMRC.
Even if you do, they will likely just send you a letter saying something along the lines of “we have been made aware via eBay that for the period 1/1/24 - 31/12/2024 you have sold a total of 35 items for which you have received income to the value of £2,000. Can you please tick the box below to confirm whether these sales were personal items belonging to you, items sold in the course of a business or a combination of both”.
I.e. they will ask you to declare if you are trading or not.
You then tick the box saying these were personal items and sign to that effect and that should be the end of it.
Obviously, HMRC can request more information or, if they think you aren’t being honest they can investigate further or go back over prior years, but remember the eBay detail will show exactly what the 35 items are.
If these were say 29 different locks, a couple of DVDs, a few clothes etc. it would be pretty obvious you are not trading. If however it was 35 brand new exact same items then they may want to dig deeper but not necessarily.
You could put a note in with the letter explaining that you collect locks and have this year sold 29 that you no longer want but plan to buy more.
But it doesn’t matter, you are not trading.
Regarding your tax position. You can indeed earn £12,570 without having to pay tax in the current tax year and that threshold has been the same for a while now.
Any income over that amount will be subject to 20% tax and 40% on anything above £50,270.
Your taxable income will include pensions, benefits, carers allowance, wages and online selling in the course of a business (not personal items) plus income from savings/investment (interest) over £1000 if a lower rate tax payer, £500 as a higher rate taxpayer, but HMRC get that info direct from banks/building societies and will inform you if you owe anything separately.
You wouldn’t normally need to do a tax return just for investment interest.
The only thing to be aware of is if in previous years you were actually trading as opposed to collecting, as soon as you had sales of over £1000 you should have registered as self employed and filled in a tax return for each of those years, even if you had no other income.
The return would pull together all your income including benefits but, if this total was under £12,570 you still would not owe any tax (or National Insurance).
Hope that helps a bit and I haven’t confused you more?
