Transfer Vehicle Ownership...or Else!

Be sure to transfer vehicle ownership after every car you buy and sell. I sold an old Jeep to someone, made a decent profit, and then months later got a letter from the police telling me that I owed money for a parking ticket. What the?!

I knew I wasn't responsible for the parking ticket because I only had the Jeep for a week before selling it.

The same thing happened to me many years ago after selling a van. I got a letter from the San Francisco Police saying something about my van being involved in a hit-and-run accident. Again, I knew that wasn’t me because that van had never been up to San Fran in the couple years I owned it.

I sold my own personal F150 and got a registration renewal notice from the DMV saying it was time to renew my trucks registration. Well, the thing is that I sold that truck about eight months before…and I filled out and mailed in the ‘Transfer Vehicle Ownership’ form found at the bottom of the California pink slip (also known as a ‘title’ or ‘certificate of ownership’).

A similar situation happened when I sold a sailboat to a friend of mine. He bought this fixer-upper from me and good ol buddy Erik never got around to transferring the vehicle ownership into his name. It was about a year after I sold it that I got a letter from some agency from the area I originally bought the boat telling me that I owed some taxes on it.

In all four cases, I could have been liable…

The problem is that many car buyers are lazy and can’t be bothered to take the time and expense to transfer vehicle ownership so they will just drive around with YOUR name on the title and registration. The freaky thing is that a friend of mine did this with a Corvette for something like six years before finally transferring it into his name!

This is much more likely to happen to someone involved in buying and selling cars for profit because of the volume of used cars that will pass through you compared to the typical private party seller that might sell only one car every five years or so.

Obviously you don’t want the police or DMV saying you are liable for something that you were never involved in. Fortunately this is a problem that is easily remedied, and in both cases I was able to prove that I wasn’t the owner of the vehicle at the time the incident took place.

To make sure this transfer of vehicle ownership issue never becomes YOUR issue…

Fill in all your Bill Of Sales with the full name of the buyer and all the information about the car you’re selling (VIN, license number, year, model, etc.). Be sure and put the buyer’s address and all their phone numbers (home, cell and work) on there too.

Keep a copy of all your Bill Of Sales and put them in a file folder. If the police or DMV ever contact you about something that happened with the vehicle after you sold it then all you have to do is give them a copy of that particular Bill Of Sale to prove who you sold the car to and the date you sold it to prove that the transfer of vehicle ownership happened.

That’s what I did and each time the people contacting me said “Okay, no problem” (thanks to my trusty transfer vehicle ownership file) and went on their merry way to contact the person I sold the vehicle to. So for your protection, create your own transfer vehicle ownership file folder.

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