A friend was involved in a class action lawsuit against a car dealership and the settlement for the participants was a $2000 credit on a new car purchase. You negotiate your best deal and then produce your credit for another $2000. off the purchase price.
Anyway, class actions are only good for lawyers.
That said, how can I get the $2000 credit. If she buys the car then I will have to pay sales tax afterwards when car is transferred. Also, this would preclude financing car or at least confuse the issue.
Any thoughts; preferrably ones that I haven’t had yet?
Let me get this straight: You are not a participant in the suit; you are therefore not legally entitled to a portion of the settlement; but you want access to the proceeds of the settlement that by law belong to your friend.
There actually a very straight-forward and easy means by which you can probably do this, assuming your friend is okay with you receiving the proceeds instead of her.
But in light of the gratuitous slam on lawyers, you’ll have to hope someone else drops by to tell you what it is.
While I generally don’t like postings by people trying to get something they are not entitled to, I don’t see why this post is an issue.
In particular, the person who has the $2000 credit coming might not be able to take advantage of it and it otherwise (doubly) hosed.
So someone buys a car for less money than usual (which I actually doubt), turns around and sells it to someone for a regular price, happens to be a friend. What’s the issue?
(Note: selling it to the friend for the discount price is of course a financial loss. Does the original buyer understand this?)
(Note, I consider, e.g., using a friend’s employee discount as not the same. They are not losing something if they don’t buy.)
As to class action suits like this and the ridiculous settlement terms. We got a letter about such a settlement a couple weeks ago. Without reading it all I said “I bet all we get is $200 off buying something expensive at Best Buy” and that turns out to be exactly it. Great, the “reward” for being ripped off is the chance to be ripped off again. Just send me $10 and I’ll be a lot happier.
I just find it amazing that the result of a class-action suit was to force plaintiffs to buy another car from that dealership. Never heard of anything like that.
WAG:
A car dealer doesn’t pay sales tax on cars he buys and sells to customers. Have your friend get a dealer’s license, buy the car and then sell it to you. It is possible that the dealer’s license is about $100 and you’d still make out.
In California if someone sells a car to a family member they don’t have to pay sales tax (or as they call it ‘use tax’). But I assume your friend is not related.
GM did something like that with their 70’s era pick-ups that had saddle style gas tanks. I got a $500 coupon good against another car. Something like that. If I recall, I could also sign it over to a family member, or ‘sell’ it to someone else for like half the value.
I’m not a lawyer. Given how obvious this seems to me, I don’t see how it can possibly be legal (everyone would do this if it were legal, I’d imagine.)
Your friend buys the car from the dealer.
Your friend sells you the car for $100.
You give your friend a “gift” for the remainder.
If the car value is over $10,000, you give the friend a $9,999 gift on Dec 31st and the rest on Jan 1st.
If the car value is over $20,000, your friend might have to trust you to give the gift the balance on Jan 1st of 2005 (plus interest, I’d imagine).
Could you just ask the dealer if it could be transferred? That’ll remove thier liability to your friend that they still owe anyway, and give them a customer today instead of two years later when your friend wants a car. They may be willing to do so, and it’ll be a lot easier for you than all of the other suggestions.
Heck, what’s the make of the car you want? That could be helpful for reasons I won’t go into until I know what it is.
I understand that his friend buys a car (the model he wants etc), gets $2,000 off the price and a week later sells the car to him for the price that she paid to the delaership.
Everyone is happy - Dealership sells car and has to accept the $2,000 settlement, County gets a car for $2,000 less than normal and County’s friend gets exactly what she paid for the car.
I assume that County will actually give the friend the money for the car up front so the friend doesn’t lose at all.
Am I missing something E.G. do you have to pay sales tax when you privately sell your car to someone else. If this is the case, how do they police that?
Surely only the plaintiff has direct access made to any awards made under an action brought on their behalf.
How the plaintiff disposes of any assets gained from that award is a matter for them.
Even if it were possible to transfer the credit, I doubt that doing so would not be a good idea unless it is a full and final award with absolutely no possibility of any further legal action.
Pergau, the problem (as you guessed) is that sales tax is paid BOTH times the car is sold. When you go to transfer the car registration, you have to provide the sales information, and then you’re on the hook for the tax.
So if the plaintiff wants to dispose of the asset (coupon) by giving it to County, she should be able to without a problem, right? I think it’s rather horrid that they give out non-transferable coupons. Oh, I know it’s due to the low rate of usage of the things and therefore to the dealership’s benefit, but it sure doesn’t seem fair to the people who received them. Only thing I can think of that may work is to buy the car jointly and then, once it’s paid for, your friend signs the title over to you exclusively, but that opens up a whole other can of worms.