Donating Your Vehicle to Charity? Be Sure To Read This First [GALLERY]
My husband's parents were kind enough to gift us a SUV that they no longer wanted and the vehicle served us well for two years, but eventually, the problems and cost to fix them were too much and we had to make the tough decision to let it go.
Neither my husband or I have ever donated or scrapped a car and so we had no idea where to even start other than with research which is how we learned about an organization which takes vehicle donations and the profits from selling or scrapping the vehicle are given to aid disabled veterans. The attractive part to us was that the non-profit organization would arrange for someone to pick up the car that we wanted to donate. All we had to do was turn in the plates to our DMV and inform our insurance company that we needed to cancel our coverage.
We live on the border of New York and Pennsylvania, on the Pennsylvania side and an added step for us was that we had to have our title notarized in order to transfer it to the non-profit organization. The laws where you are might be a bit different and if you're donating through an IRS recognized non-profit, they'll be able to tell you exactly what you'll need and need to do.
I can't even tell you how quickly things happened once I called the non-profit organization to tell them we wanted to donate our car. I called on a Wednesday and by the following Monday they'd sent a tow truck to pick up our vehicle and give us a donation receipt for tax purposes.
Remember how I said that we turned in our plates and cancelled our insurance policy? We also took everything out of our vehicle and as far as we were concerned, that was it. We were done. Until I reached out to Joe Stanley at Stanley Law.
Joe dropped a nugget on us that we weren't expecting. Joe explained from personal experience that it would be in our best interest to scrape off our registration and inspection stickers before letting our car be hauled away. It would be very easy for someone to slap on some stolen plates and for us to get hit with parking tickets and other fines, just as Joe was.
If you're planning to do what my family did and donate your car, there are some things that you definitely want to do before you simply wave farewell.