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Thursday, August 16, 2012

Let This Be A Lesson

This is Steven Petrick posting.

I bought my Honda Accord brand new back in 1987. At the time I was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, so I bought the car in Columbus, Georgia. At the time I could not pay cash for it, so the bank owned a piece of it.

I separated service in 1989 and moved to Amarillo, Texas, and duly registered the car in Randall County, Texas.

In 1992 I made the last payment on the car.

Turns out, I do not have a title to the car.

I am not kidding.

It gets better.

If the car had died last year, I could have donated it to any number of organizations. But the Federal government has decided that too many people are using car donations as a means of disposing of stolen cars, so as of last year (according to the various organizations I have spoken to who would normally accept a dead car) no car can be donated unless it has a title. (You cannot really argue with that if it is a real problem, and I do not know if it is as I honestly had not heard that there was a problem with people donating stolen cars.)

Okay, I paid for the car, I bought it honestly and brand new from an auto dealership, so it should be no problem getting the title.

If you thought that, you would be wrong.

It turns out that all Randall county can do is direct me to Georgia's Department of Motor Vehicles, or have me do a "bonded title."

So I have spoken to the Georgia Department of Motor Vehicles, and according to their records the car has never (I say again, never) been in the State of Georgia.

The best guess right now is that the bank got the title for the vehicle in some state other than Georgia until I paid for it, but nobody knows, and so far several searches for the vehicle's Vehicle Identification Number have not turned up anything. (Honda is searching their own data base, but has not reported back as of yet.)

So, if you have a car (or anything else requiring a title), make very, very certain you know where the title is. If you have not paid it off yet, make sure the bank gives you the title when you have paid it off.

Sigh.