Categories: Marketing

Selling a Car Yourself

With three cars between us, Dave and I decided we needed to sell my little unpaid-for red Honda Fit. I rarely needed to drive it and over $300 per month in car payments and insurance just didn’t make sense. So we sold it on Auto Trader.com, a service I recommend. However, the process of selling a car yourself does have a few pitfalls. I will mention a few of them.

First, read, take notes, print out and re-read the info on your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles site. There’s usually a section marked: What To Do When You Sell Your Car. If you have paid it off and have the title, find it. If you have not paid off the lien yet (as in our case) this complicates matters. Dave and I were just plain unlucky enough to run into some problem nearly every step in the process. It’s a good thing we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into!

Problem #1: Weird Calls from our Craigslist ad

Before I started advertising on Auto-Trader, I tried an ad on Craigslist. Almost immediately, we began getting calls from businesses who have some sort of scam in which they claim they have a buyer for your car willing to pay full price. The catch is that WE – Dave and I – need to send $500 which will be added to the sale price when this fictitious buyer comes through. I had never heard of this scam before, so the first time I got a call like this, I hopped onto the computer, googled the name of the business + scam and found a bunch of complaints from suckers who fell for their spiel. I hung up. Many times. They are still calling a month later although the car is no longer on Auto-Trader.

Problem #2: Incorrect Mileage on CARFAX

Auto-Trader offers the choice of ordering a CARFAX (official report on your vehicle’s history) which I decided to do in order to assure potential buyers that the car had been well-maintained and not in an accident. The mileage on the CARFAX was over 36,000 miles, 16,000 more than my odometer and which would have put my car out of warranty! Luckily I had saved oil change receipts with the mileage written on them. I went down to the DMV with the CARFAX and the oil change receipts and my car, and found out that someone at the AZ DMV had incorrectly written down and reported my mileage and the incorrect number even ended up on the car’s title! The DMV gave me a paper saying that they had made a mistake by listing the incorrect mileage on the title. We stapled a copy of that letter onto the CARFAX we showed to potential buyers.

Problem #3: Paying off the Lien When We Sold the Car

The second person who actually saw my car decided to buy it on the spot. He brought cash. He wanted to hand us the cash, get a bill of sale and the title, and drive home. BUT it’s not that simple when you still owe money on the car. He had to go down to the bank with us and wait for numerous papers to be filled out and signed, then was allowed to take a copy of the lien release and a bill of sale home with the car.

We should have driven home with him, then removed our license plate, but we didn’t. We knew that he would be waiting around for a week or two until the new title came in, and were under the impression that he needed the title to get it registered. (He didn’t but this is not clearly explained anywhere that I could find in the DMV website. ) By the way, AZ only uses one plate in the rear of the vehicle.

Problem # 4: Waiting Forever for the Title to Arrive

No matter what the bank tells you, it will take FOREVER for the title to finally arrive in your mail. I think they send it overseas and back. We sold the car and requested the title on Oct. 13, the title finally came on Nov. 6. Our buyer called me several times, growing more and more impatient. At one point, he threatened to just “return the car and get his money back!” (horrors!) It finally arrived, we signed it and sent it off the same day to our buyer, everyone was happy. Right? No chance.

Problem #5: Mystery of the Missing Refund

I called our buyer to make sure he had received the title and asked when I could stop by to pick up the license plate so we could apply for a refund of the several hundred dollars credit we had on the car’s tag. He very quickly informed me, “Oh, there’s no credit on the tag. But if you want the plate, I can mail it to you.” Right away this should have been a clue. No credit? And why would this guy be so willing to go to the trouble of mailing us the plate?

I called AZ DMV and found out that we actually did not need the plate to request a refund. Dave went down the next day to do so, and was told that there was no credit left on the plate’s tag. He knew that he had paid over $500 for a two-year tag, so asked what had happened to the credit. After much research, running back and forth to talk to the manager and looking at records, they determined that someone at the Surprise DMV where our buyer had gotten his new car registered had mistakenly given HIM the $269 credit from our tag! This morning Dave and I drove out to Surprise (30 minutes away) and the poor clerk said to us during the 30-40 minutes we stood at her counter, “I’m sorry I happened to call your number!” But she and her supervisor tracked down all the records and will talk to the person who made the mistake tomorrow, then call our buyer to tell him that he needs to come back in and pay to register his car, and eventually we will get our refund check in the mail. On the way home,we discussed whether our buyer knew that he shouldn’t have gotten that credit, and decided that he darn well knew. We have no clue how he thought that we wouldn’t find out about it. We chuckle when we imagine his reaction upon getting the phone call saying that he has to come down and actually pay for his tag or they will cancel it! Tee hee!

If anyone actually made it through to the end of this, thanks for letting me get all this out of my system! Hope it helps you in the future! Maybe you should just keep your car instead of selling it yourself, or trade it in!