Posted by D. Sherman on Friday, January 25, 2008 at 00:29:06 :
Just got back from driving 100 miles to with my girlfriend to pick up her new vehicle. She's been looking for a Toyota 4-Runner, Subaru Forester, or Honda CRV. Last week we found a 92 4-Runner in excellent condition for $4200. The lady selling it just got out of the army yesterday, got a new vehicle, and is moving. I checked it out and it looks like a good deal, especially since she agreed to sell it for $3800. She'd had it inspected by some professional inspection service and had a long checklist of things they checked, with the only problem being a slight valve cover gasket leak and a hole in the muffler. It has ~80% rubber on the snow tires that are on it now, and she's including a set of summer tires on 20" aluminum rims as well. All looks good, the price is right, so we drive over with $3800 cash in hand to get the truck. The lady offers us $40 because the gas tank was nearly empty. We're touched that she was so thoughtful, but tell her it's okay like it is. She cleaned the truck out so it would be nice, even though we would have bought it as it was. Since we're transferring it out of state, I asked her to write up a bill of sale with a price on it, which she did. Everything's set to go, and I say, okay, all we need now is the title.
Oh. Um. Is this it? She hands me a sheet from the DOL that says "Application for Title" on the top. It lists her has the registered owner, and a credit union as the legal owner. I ask her what's up with that. She tells us a long story about how she bought it last summer from her friend, Sakib, who was going to Korea and she got a personal loan where they gave her the money as a credit card that she can use just like a credit card, and the credit union being on the paper wasn't any problem when she bought it from Sakib. I'm not sure how much of that story has anything to do with anything, when the simple fact is that after two 100-mile trips and lots of talking, we find out she's selling a car she doesn't own! It's 2 minutes before 5:00 so I said let's go inside and you call the credit union and straighten this out. Of course they were closed by then. My g/f is majorly disappointed, I spent half the day and drove 200 miles for nothing, and this airhead girl is apologizing all over the place, which of course isn't doing anything towards fixing the problem. We both kept our cool (what else can you do?), but I cannot believe anybody can be so ignorant as to think they can sell a car without a clear title.
For all I know, the credit union lienholder represents some loan to "Sakib", who probably pocketed the money he got from this lady, while she thought that since she was able to register it in her name, it must be her car. I tried to explain that a registered owner is not a legal owner, and that if she wants to sell this car to anybody, she needs to go to the credit union immediately tomorrow with cash in hand, pay off the loan, get the title, go to the courthouse, and get herself on the title as legal owner. I'm not sure she understood any of it, and I'm not sure she has any cash to pay it off with, even if she wanted to.
I guess from now on whenever we look at private-party vehicles, we're going to have to have them show us the title before we look at anything or talk about anything. Okay, rant over.
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