The Expert Podcast

So the Vermont loophole is finally over. So what do you do now? Well, if you've been a viewer of this channel for the past several years, you've heard us recommend not doing the Vermont process. Even when it was available, it was not the best way to go for legitimate vehicle owners. In fact, over the past couple of years, many states separately from Vermont have already come out and said, "Look, if you get a Vermont registration, don't bother bringing it to us because we're not going to accept it." Florida had a fraud alert in their DMV. Indiana, for a while, wasn't accepting, and many states went through that process. Ohio, and finally, the pressure came to the state of Vermont, where they've now stopped accepting applications from people who are not residents of Vermont. So it's not usable. We've predicted this going back at least a year, and if you've watched our channel like I said, you've seen us talk about the fact that Vermont is not the best way to go.

Why isn't it the best way to go? Well, first of all, it takes longer than other methods. If you look at things like magistrate title, bonded title, and VT transfer prior to contact, you're going to find that the other methods are faster, and more importantly, there's sales tax. Most people don't really take into account what you would have had to pay for tax, even if the Vermont process were available. Look, on a ten thousand dollar car, you would have to pay six hundred dollars of sales tax plus another hundred or so in registration. You would have been out of pocket with $700 in fees just for Vermont, plus you have to pay all the fees to your state. If you use one of these other processes, you don't have to pay for any of them.

Now, the two methods we're going to talk about today are options. Hear me out. When you hear them, you might want to just hang up and say, "I'm not interested in those," because most people have misunderstandings about how these work. The first one is a bonded title, and a lot of people think, "I don't want to do a bonded title because I have to pay 1.5 times the vehicle in cash." That's not true. Most people think that when they read the statute, it says you have to put up 1.5 times the value of the vehicle; they think they have to pay that. So, if you have, let's say, a six thousand dollar car, that's six thousand plus fifty percent more is nine thousand, you have to pay nine thousand dollars. That's not how it works. You have to purchase a surety bond for nine thousand dollars. How much does a surety bond cost? Well, rough numbers: if you buy a surety bond for ten thousand dollars or less, it costs you about a hundred bucks, and it goes up about ten dollars per thousand over that. So a fifteen thousand dollar car would be about 150 for a surety bond, and a twenty thousand dollar car would be two hundred. So, you see how that works? If you had the same vehicle for Vermont, let's say a fifteen thousand dollar car, Vermont is going to charge you a thousand dollars in sales tax plus registration fees plus the fees to your state. If you have a bonded title, you pay 150 dollars. It's way less money, and it's faster because you don't have to wait for Vermont to give you registration and then switch it over to your state. Now, if you were thinking that if I had gone through Vermont, I could just slap that plate on the car and drive it, well, that's not good because if you drive a car with a Vermont plate in your state and you get pulled over, they're going to impound your vehicle because you're breaking the law. So, it wasn't designed to put the plate on the car; it was designed to switch over to your state. So that's the first option; it's a bonded title.

Now there are a few states that don't have bonded titles, but there are eight of them, and you can find a link on our website. So in that case, you have what's called a magistrate title or a court order title. Now, hear me out: don't get scared of the word court; it's not like you have to go to a big court case like Law and Order and go in front of a judge in a jury; that's not what we're talking about. Court-ordered process, and you can read more about it on our website. It gives you all the instructions for free and all the forms for free if you want to do it yourself for free. We have a title service; we can assist with it, but it gives you the instructions. Here's what you want to do for a court-ordered title: you file three forms with your local county court: a petition, an affidavit, and a letter of non-interest. You file these forms with the court, and they look at them. If everything seems okay, most courts sign off on them, stamp them, and you are now the owner of the vehicle. You can now bring that judgment to the DMV, slap it on the counter, and they give you a title. It's real simple; it's like you're going over the head of the DMV. If you've gotten the runaround from the DMV, if you're tired of them, you know not, you know, listen to your story or not believe in you that you own the car, just say fine. I'm not going to go over your head to your boss; go to the court and have them give you a judgment of ownership. It's a lot easier than you think, and it's still faster than Vermont. Vermont was taking three to four weeks to process these orders. You can usually get the judgment from your county court in a couple weeks; it's much faster, right?

And you don't have to pay tax to Vermont either; you probably have to pay a court fee. The ones we're hearing about in most courts are 50, 60, sometimes 100 bucks, but it's cheaper than what Vermont would have been. So two things: you still need to get a car title; that didn't change; the fact that you can't do Vermont just means you have to do something else; or do you want to throw away the car? There's really no other option, and these methods were always better than Vermont, except if you wanted to do something illegal like put the plate on the car and drive around with it. If you wanted to do that, well, you're out of luck, and that's the reason that they stopped doing it because too many people were just slapping a plate on the car and driving around with it, which is illegal. So the other methods are there if you need to get a title, and it's important to use one of those. Read our website, cartitles.com, and it'll tell you how to do it. If you don't want to get a title, then you know it doesn't really matter, but those are the ways that are available, and they always were, and really they end up being better. So don't despair too much that Vermont is over, because in reality, it just takes away something that probably wasn't good to begin with. We've counseled against this many, many times. We've done webinars, we've done presentations, and we did a