A VIN (vehicle identification number) is a specific 17-character string of numbers and letters that uniquely identifies a specific vehicle. Every car has its own VIN, no two cars are exactly alike. But what exactly does the VIN reveal? Is it possible to find out the identity of a car’s owner by looking at its VIN?
Each VIN is like a unique fingerprint that can be used to trace the history of a vehicle through its life. The VIN contains all sorts of information about the vehicle, including what country it was made in, what type of engine it has and even it’s color.
The first three characters of your VIN will tell you where the vehicle is from and where it was manufactured. The next five digits describe the vehicle, the engine, the transmission, and other technical features. The next three digits contain the vehicle’s security digit, model year, and assembly plant location. Finally, the last six digits are your vehicle’s serial number and identify your specific vehicle trim level and other specifications.
No, the VIN does not reveal the owner of the vehicle. The name and information regarding the owners of a vehicle are protected by the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) of 1994. Under this act, the DMV agency in each state heavily safeguards driver information. In some cases, depending on the VIN decoding program, it may tell you the state in which the vehicle was last titled, but not the owner’s name.
Since vehicle ownership information is not public, there is an official process you must undertake to request this information. Each state has its own method to request DPPA-protected information. To find the owner of a vehicle, you must request this information directly from the DMV agency and have a legitimate reason for doing so.
The DMV won’t just give out information when it’s requested, you must have a legal or comparable purpose for requesting this information. Oftentimes, the DMV will not provide DPPA-protected information to private individuals, instead there typically must be a third-party involved that will handle the sensitive records.
In short, the VIN provides a full history of the manufacturing and titling of the vehicle but does not reveal the ownership. If you are needing to request the vehicle ownership records, submit a DPPA request to your state DMV agency along with the VIN. Remember, to request this type of sensitive information, you must have a valid reason for doing so. Before proceeding, make sure you’re following all applicable state and federal privacy laws.
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For as little as $159 for most processes, we will save you the headache and prepare all of the car title paperwork needed to get you a new title. Simply choose the title recovery method you’d like to use and we’ll get started!
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Order Vermont Title LoopholeOrder Deceased Owner Title TransferOrder Bonded Title ProcessOrder Abandoned Vehicle ProcessOrder Prior Owner ContactOrder Lien Release Request LetterPGlmcmFtZSBzcmM9Imh0dHBzOi8vYXBwLmFjdWl0eXNjaGVkdWxpbmcuY29tL3NjaGVkdWxlLnBocD9vd25lcj0xOTQ4ODEyNiZhcHBvaW50bWVudFR5cGU9MjMwNjY0MTAiIHRpdGxlPSJTY2hlZHVsZSBBcHBvaW50bWVudCIgd2lkdGg9IjEwMCUiIGhlaWdodD0iODAwIiBmcmFtZUJvcmRlcj0iMCI+PC9pZnJhbWU+PHNjcmlwdCBzcmM9Imh0dHBzOi8vZW1iZWQuYWN1aXR5c2NoZWR1bGluZy5jb20vanMvZW1iZWQuanMiIHR5cGU9InRleHQvamF2YXNjcmlwdCI+PC9zY3JpcHQ+
Did you pay off your auto loan, but there’s still a lienholder showing on the vehicle title? This is an inquiry we receive often at our help desk. Why doesn’t the DMV automatically release your lien from the title record once it’s paid off?
So why does this happen? When you have a loan on a vehicle, you make regular payments toward the total amount of the loan. Once you’ve made your final payment, the lender will take your vehicle title that they have in their drawer, stamp it PAID sign it, and mail it to you. What they don’t do is clear the lien from the title record. You may wonder why this isn’t done automatically, but since the lender and the DMV are two different entities, they don’t communicate with one another and your lender is not the person who issues a title. The Department of Motor Vehicles or equivalent in your state is the agency to issue vehicle titles and update the title records.
So now, the bank knows that you have a zero balance on your loan, and that’s fine. But the DMV does not know that you paid off your loan until the bank tells them. However, the bank normally doesn’t tell the DMV. They tell you they signed the title and stamped it paid. Sometimes they’ll give you a lien release document, which is a separate form that tells you your loan is paid. However, the DMV who is holding your title record does not know this event happened yet. The bank normally doesn’t tell them and here’s why, in order to do that, you have to pay a fee. You have to file some forms and you have to update the records. It’s not an excessive amount of money but it might take $30-$50 to change the title. It also takes some labor to fill out the forms and file them with the DMV.
Now let me ask you this. Do you like dealing with the DMV? Do you know how long it takes to work with that bureaucracy? Well, imagine you’re a bank and you have to do a thousand of those a day. So instead of allocating extra resources and employees to do all this, they just stamp the title paid sign it mail it to you. Now, as long as you have that title in your hands, You’re good. If you need to sell it, you’re good. But what if you lose that title? What if it never gets to you? Now, you’re in limbo because you know the loan is paid, the bank knows the loan is paid, but the DMV does not know the loan is paid. So what we recommend doing is as soon as you get that lien release or that title, take it right down to your titling authority and change the title record to reflect there is no more loan on that vehicle. There’s no longer a lien on that vehicle. That way, no matter what happens in the future your title is clear.
If you’re in a position where you lost a title, you didn’t get the paperwork from the bank, and now you’re trying to sell your car maybe move to another state maybe you already moved to another state and that state doesn’t have your updated title record. Well, now you have a problem. Now you have to go back to that lien holder to get a new document showing that they say the loan is clear because the DMV is not going to take your word for it. Even though it might be 10 years old. That car, the loan might be 10 or 15 years old. The DMV is not allowed by law to remove a lien claim on a vehicle just based on the owner saying there’s no more lien, because if that was the case then any owner who didn’t want to pay their car loan could just call the DMV and say Hey, my loan is paid off, take it off my title record. So they can’t do that. They have to leave it on there until they get a formal written document from the lien holder.
So, if you’re in a position where you have a vehicle maybe you have a loan maybe you bought it from somebody with a loan and you need to clear that lien, it’s very important that you do it a certain way. Don’t call up the bank or the lien holder to ask them to remove it because it won’t get done. They might say they’ll do it but then they won’t or they might just say we can’t do it or go to the website. They just want to get you out of their hair. The reason why is that banks don’t have staff that is dedicated to removing liens from title records, they don’t have staff for that. So what you have to do is you have to do most of the work for them, you fill out the forms you prepare them, and mail them to them by certified mail registered mail, priority mail something with tracking so that you know that they got it. Because there’s an employee there that can at least sign something. There’s probably not a staff at that bank that can fill out all the forms and find the right forms. First of all, every state has a different form, so they have to find it. So you might have to do some of the legwork so that it makes it easy for you.
The most important thing to keep in mind is lien releases do not happen automatically when you pay your last payment. The bank doesn’t clear it from the title records. In some states on newer vehicles, there might be an electronic lien that gets cleared but a lot of times we still find there are errors. If you’ve moved to a different state, that throws it out of whack too. If you got a loan one year before you paid it off and you moved to a different state. Now both states have conflicting records, so you’re going to run into problems. This is something that is very common, don’t feel like the bank or the DMV are singling you out. For assistance obtaining a lien release letter from your lender, CarTitles.com can help.
So if you’ve been looking at cars to buy new or used for the last year or two you found that first of all there are a lot of inventory shortages and the prices are high. People have been waiting for a long time for prices to come down, thinking that maybe interest rates are higher or that there’s a recession happening that prices might come down. Well according to Barron’s and many other sources, inventories are coming up. There is more availability of vehicles but there’s not going to be any price reduction to especially on new cars. Why is that? Doesn’t supply and demand kick in and make prices go down? Well, let’s take a look at four reasons why new car prices are not going to come down.
First, there’s still big demand even though the prices are higher. In fact, People are paying a thousand dollars a month for car payments because of interest rates and prices. There’s still a very big demand for new vehicles so it’s not that. There’s a lot of inventory glut where car dealerships can’t get rid of cars So there’s still a big demand and that’s gonna keep prices high.
The second thing is manufacturers and dealers are getting used to being able to make a profit with lower volume. It used to be the dealer scrambled for every last sale selling 300-500 cars a month to try to pay all their bills and have a profit for the dealership and manufacturers. They strove to sell 12 or 14 million cars a year for the U S market. Well, now they’ve learned how to make money selling fewer cars. You have a little more margin, you do less advertising, you have less overhead, you have less interest on your inventory, and you could make money selling fewer cars and it’s less work. If you only have to sell a hundred cars a month that’s a few a day. If you have to sell 500 cars a month, well now you have to sell 10-15 cars a day. It’s a lot harder of a scramble to sell high volumes of vehicles. So dealers and manufacturers are both learning, “Gee, we don’t have to sell as many cars. We just don’t have to discount them as much. Put a fixed price on them, MSRP, and sell them for that and we’ll make money.”
Number three, the other thing is manufacturers are not putting a lot of money into creating new inventory. Here’s why. Within the next four to five or six years there’s going to be a huge switch to electric vehicles. Many states are making it illegal to sell gas-powered vehicles in their states, California, New York, and Washington state are three examples of states that said after 2028-2030, you can’t sell gas vehicles. So manufacturers are not going to be putting money into R&D and production of newer model vehicles. Lead times on coming out with a new model are three to four years, so whatever models are being made right now that’s going to be it for gasoline vehicles. So why put a lot of investment into new vehicles if you’re going to have to just come out with electric vehicles anyways?
Here’s reason number four, this is a big deal. The cost of producing a vehicle is much higher and you might think, well isn’t that supply chain inflation? That’s a big part of it. Still getting sheet metal engines, manufactured goods, and components are all higher. Inflation doesn’t just affect you at the gas pump or at the grocery store, it affects the car manufacturer and their production plant. But more than that they are having trouble getting workers, getting employees to build these vehicles is harder and you have to pay more. The cost of manufacturing a vehicle has gone way up now in order to get a halfway decent vehicle of any substantial kind, not even luxury but just a nice vehicle. It’s going to be $40-$45,000. The days of a $20-$30,000 vehicle are over. There are still a few that are in that range, but they’re very limited models. Stripped out vehicles. You’re going to be spending $40-$45,000 anyways to get a decent car. In most manufacturers, that’s going to put you at a payment of $800-$900 bucks a month. So people are getting used to that. A large percentage of car buyers are now paying over a thousand dollars a month for their car payments. The fact that now that’s been baked into the system, dealerships and manufacturers can be more comfortable with presenting that payment to customers.
So prices aren’t going to come down on new vehicles anytime soon. Also, there won’t be huge discounts on new vehicles there won’t be $2,000 rebates or $2,000 dealer discounts, or other large, opportunities for reductions in price. So new vehicles are going to be pegged where they are. It’s not going to come down, now used vehicles are a different story. If there’s a big glut of used cars coming into the market that might lower them but they may not be the cars you want. If they’re 60 or 70,000-mile cars they’re out of warranty. You might not want that car because manufacturers are now building cars that they know are going to be replaced in three or four years with EVs. Why build them where they’re going to last a long time? Why put the same amount of reliability into a car that you know you don’t have to really warranty because people aren’t going to be looking for a replacement for that car? In four or five years they’re going to want or have to buy an EV. So new vehicle prices are where they are. They’re not going to come down, expect us to pay $800-$900 bucks a month for a car payment. If you really are looking for a bargain, look at maybe a late model used that you can keep for three or four years until you get forced into an electric vehicle.
Every week we sit down with our customer service representatives and our sales staff and ask them “what are the most unusual questions that we’ve heard from callers or inquiries to our company?” And this week one of the ones that came up was what do you do about notifying a sale or forcing a sale of a vehicle that you sold but the buyer does not transfer the title.
This comes up a lot when you sell a car on Craigslist or eBay or some other private sale and you give the title to the buyer. If they don’t put it in their name right away some sellers worry that they have liability or they can get in trouble if the car is used in a crime or gets in an accident or gets parking tickets. So it is important that you want to get that transfer done. Now, the buyer by law is supposed to apply for a new title in their name within a certain period of time, but what if they don’t do it? What if they don’t follow through on what they’re required to do? How does that affect you? Do you have liability? Can you get in trouble? Because technically, as far as the DMV and the police are concerned, it’s on you, right?
Here are some suggestions on how to make sure that your vehicle transfer doesn’t come back to haunt you.
First of all, when you sell a vehicle, in most states the license plate does not go with the vehicle. So you want to take the license plates off the vehicle. The title and registration are two different things. The title is who the owner(s) are, and the registration or the license plate is what allows you to drive it. So if you’re in a state where the license plates don’t stay with the vehicle make sure you take them off. Don’t let the person just say Hey, I want to use it to drive home and I’ll send them back to you because now you’re giving that person your license plate to drive around with. If they get tickets if they go through red lights if they go through toll booths, the ticket is going to come back to you. So take off your license plates. In a few states, the license plate goes with the car.
The second thing to do is to make sure that you actually sign the back of the title and put the name of the buyer. Do not sign an open title. A lot of times the buyer will say Well, I’ll just sign it and I’ll put the name in later cause I might put it in somebody else’s name. Don’t sign an open title. Put the name of the buyer on that title. In fact, most states require that you do this it’ll say right on the title you have to put the name you can’t sign it blank. In addition, look at the ID of the person that’s buying it, and make sure you write down their name and address so you know who actually is buying the car from you. You want to have a record of that transaction. Prepare a bill of sale for the transfer. You sign it and have the buyer sign it. Keep a copy, maybe make two. You keep one they keep one, or if you only make one, take a picture of it and make a photocopy or whatever you want to do. And make sure you have a copy of the front and back of your title at the time of transfer, that’s all you can do: license plate, bill of sale, copy of the title, and write down their ID.
Now, once the sale’s completed you next want to go to your state’s DMV and get a notice of sale or notice of transfer or affidavit of transfer. Every state or most states have a form like this that you can submit this form to get the vehicle on notice that it’s no longer yours. So God forbid anything happens with that vehicle, if somebody uses it in a drive-by or a bank robbery, the police or the DMV are not going to come looking for you because they’ve already been made aware that the vehicle is not yours. So what says right here is if you sell a transfer of a motor vehicle you must submit this notice within 30 days. Well, guess what? In this state it’s required, whether the buyer puts it in their name or not as a seller you’re required to make a notification. Complete the section and sign the notice. Mail it to the address at the bottom. Keep a copy for your records. Failure to complete the required blocks will result in the notice not being processed.
The reason you want to do that is that first of all in some states it’s required by law. But more importantly, it puts the department of motor vehicles or in this case, the DOR department of revenue whoever issues titles, on notice that you are no longer the owner of that vehicle. You sold it. If the new owner puts it in their name or applies for a title or not, not your problem. Sometimes buyers don’t even get a title. They go out of state. Maybe your buyer is moving to another state or they go to another state. If you don’t file this notice your home state will never know you sold the vehicle. So find that notice of transfer. Make a copy of your bill of sale. Submit that with it. If you can’t find a form for your state, go down to the department of motor vehicles in person. Don’t try to do it by phone. Don’t try to do it by email. Go in person with your photo ID, the bill of sale with your VIN number, and tell them, look, I sold this vehicle, how do I get out of my name? Because you want to avoid liability.
If you’re concerned about what your liability might be you may want to contact an attorney. We can’t give you legal advice or give legal-type instructions, but you do want to make sure that any vehicle ownership is disclaimed by you. Once you don’t have control of the vehicle, you don’t know where it’s been where it’s going or what it’s doing what liability or costs it’s incurring. So you want to make that notice public and put it with the DMV. That’s the most common question for this week. Look for future videos and put your comments below. If you have questions about unusual title scenarios we can answer them for you.
If you leased a vehicle in the last three years you may have found that that turned out to be a very smart money move and here’s why…
When you lease a vehicle for 2-4 years you make payments but at the end of that term, you can just walk away from the vehicle rather than having another two or three years worth of payments. Where now, the car is out of warranty and may have high miles, or you may just want another car. Most people only keep cars for two or three years anyways and then flip them to a new car. If you financed it, you probably would owe more money than it’s worth but if you lease the vehicle, at the end of that three years you walk back, drop off the keys, and you walk away. Now, you also have the option to purchase the vehicle.
At the beginning of the lease, you are given a written, documented contracted etched-in-stone option where you can buy it for a fixed amount. Usually, for a three-year lease, it’s about half of what the original price was. So if you buy a $50,000 car at the end of three years after you’ve made your payments you can either walk away. Or pay half the value of the car and own it. Up until the last couple of years, the lease companies guessed pretty well as to what the value is going to be in three years and it was almost a breakeven. So if your buyout option was $25,000, the car was probably worth $25,000. In fact, in some cases, the buyout option was more than the current value because lease companies and manufacturers sometimes artificially goosed up that number to give you a lower payment. In a way that discounted the car without making it seem like it was a bargain. For example, if you’re leasing a BMW or you’re going to buy a BMW and they had big stickers in the window that said $2,000 rebate 0% financing and all kinds of balloons and carnival acts, you might not think that BMW is really that prestigious of a brand if they have all these discounts flying around. A lot of manufacturers even the discounted and lower-end cars got away from this circus act of discounting. What they did instead was they put the discount built into a lease so they could just offer you a lower payment. And it was a way to discount the vehicle without having to make it look like blue light special, right? So what that did was artificially raised up the residual and the advantage of the manufacturer is if you bought off the vehicle they never lost that money.
But here’s the thing, over the last two years or so used car values have gone through the roof. So many people get to the end of their lease and realize that their buyout is way less than the market value. In fact, that car that you have a buyout of $30,000 or $25,000 might be worth $31,000 or $32,000. So if you buy it you’re already making money. Even if you don’t want to keep the car if you buy it and then resell it you could pocket the difference. Or if you are going to get a new car anyways, instead of doing a lease turn-in, do a lease trade-in. A little bit different scenario with just one word. A lease turn-in is you walk away, drop off the keys and you’re done. A lease trade-in is you use that lease residual as a trade-in toward your next car. So if it’s worth $30K and the buyout was $25K, that $5,000 equity goes towards your next car. So buying out that lease is a very smart financial move if the residual value is lower than the market value. And in many cases, it is with this current market.
Now going forward, if you lease a car today, that might not be the case three years from now. So don’t make this a motivation to lease a new car right now might not be the same thing in two or three years but right now is a sweet spot. If you leased the car from 2018-2020, and your lease is up or coming up definitely check out residual and make sure the paperwork is done. It’s a little bit of a tricky scenario buying out your lease because it’s not a lien where you do a lien payoff you’re doing a lease buyout where it transfers ownership, and you have to make sure that’s done correctly, but at lease by out could be a way to add equity to your next purchase or just simply put cash in your pocket.
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