Beware – New car tax regs in Georgia
The fantastic GA legislature has just passed a new amendment affecting the sale of used cars, or more specifically the titling of them.
A couple of years ago, under pressure from the Used Car lobby, they introduced ahem, I mean a “title fee” on the titling of all used cars. This was done because of the rise of craigslist etc where people like you and I could rampantly sell a car to each other without having to deal with “used Car Dealers” and thereby “doing them out of business”.
This “title fee” was unsurprisingly the same %age as a sales tax would be, i.e. 7% (started at 6 and has now risen). This fee was based on their internal blue book value for all cars, in the case of an 81 DeLorean, the value was $6700 and therefore the fee was $483. And this is per title, with no pro-rata refund. This also applied to owners from other states who moved to GA and applied to get a GA title. You too would have to pay $483, but ironically you wouldn’t actually get a title as GA doesn’t issue titles to cars over 25 years old.
So in 2017 the New Car lobby objected as they had to pay a sales tax on the actual cost of the car and used car dealers did not. So they have now changed the system whereby the Title Fee is 7% of the actual sales cost of the car, or the DMV blue book, whichever is higher (naturally). Therefore if I had bought Ben’s car for $40k, I would have paid a “Title Fee” of $2800. If I then sold it to Ron for $40k the next week, he too would have to pay $2800 to the state.
Owner’s moving from out of state get a break though; it’s only 4% on the sales cost of a car that you already own !!!
https://www.myajc.com/news/state--re...QLDyQjFHFA8pK/
