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Time and again, it’s the one complaint we hear most often from people who spend more money and earn less than they’d like – “I suck at negotiating.” “I couldn’t sell space heaters to Eskimos.” “Not only did I pay the seller’s asking price, I gave him a 15% tip and offered to spend the next couple of weekends painting his house. And pay for the paint.”

There are plenty of books about negotiation – Ron Shapiro and Mark Jankowski’s The Power of Nice is worthwhile if you can find a partner to do the exercises with – but none will teach you anywhere near as much as actual bargaining and deal-cutting will. As anyone who’s read a book on automotive maintenance knows, theory is no substitute for practice.

Here’s a quick and cheap way to build valuable negotiating experience, with very little downside. Best of all, it’ll make you feel like an aspiring criminal.

Ticket scalping.

Particularly, live scalping. None of that StubHub child’s play. We’re talking about the kind of negotiation where you actually have to face the other party in the transaction, should a transaction occur.

That last clause is critical. There doesn’t have to be a deal. Millions of people carry the mistaken belief that sealing a deal is necessarily an accomplishment. It isn’t. Most negotiations are worth walking away from, at least temporarily. Time can often be your friend, especially if the other party’s facing a deadline.

The standard example for ticket scalping is sports, but concerts also work if the artist is big enough. If you live in a city with an NHL or NBA team, one scalping session – either as a buyer or a seller – will teach you enough to go into your next car or house negotiation in a far better position.

Strategies differ if you’re a buyer or a seller. We’ll address each individually.

BUYER:

Say you’re in Des Moines a week from tomorrow and want to see Bon Jovi at the Wells Fargo Center.

1. Find out how much tickets officially cost. In this case, they range from $20 to $130. That venue diagram is critical.

2. Spend a minute on eBay and 30 seconds on Craig’s List to determine going rates, which rarely match list price.

3. Determine how badly you want to see this show. Assign a dollar figure to it if you can. “I’d love to be on the floor, but not for a penny more than $150.” If you’ll spend the rest of your life in regret if you miss the show, then presumably you should have bought tickets beforehand. This isn’t Led Zeppelin at the O2 Arena or the Super Bowl. There’ll be other Bon Jovi shows. Jon will still be dreamy.

If the event is something you can live without seeing, it’s time to have some fun.

4. Go to the venue no more than 20 minutes before showtime. That is, get yourself there in enough time to have parked and walked to the ticket window (which, of course, is where scalpers congregate.)

You don’t want to get there any earlier. If you linger without visible purpose for an hour, you’ll betray yourself as someone who’s looking for tickets and will be propositioned by any number of professional scalpers. Any scalper who propositions you will force you to make a decision then and there. If you want to defer your decision until shortly before game time, your bargaining power with that scalper will rapidly decrease. He (they’re always male) then might even refuse to sell to you out of spite, which is an option for him if there’s at least one other buyer visible.

If you haven’t memorized the seating chart, bringing it with you wouldn’t hurt, although you don’t want to tip your hand as a naïf by making the chart visible to the regular scalpers. (Who’ll be easy to spot, and even easier to hear.)

Next week, we show you how to go in for the kill.