Of cousrse you don’t need to handle actual cash - ask the dealer what your options are with regards to check, wire transfer, etc., they do these sorts of transactions daily.
This ask the dealer, they will know the best way to get your money.
Why should I give a rat’s ass about the car dealer filing a Form 8300? Why is the filing of a Form 8300 any worse than a Currency Transaction Report?
Ladies and Gentlemen, it is perfectly legal to conduct a cash transaction for as much as you want to, provided the other party is willing to accept that much cash. The fact that there are reporting requirements for cash transactions exceeding certain thresholds does not change the fact that these transactions are perfectly legal. Engaging in cash transactions exceeding these reporting thresholds will not invite adverse consequences, unless the authorities are already eyeballing you for a preexisting pattern of illegal financial activities.
The physical security associated with carrying large amounts of cash in public is a separate issue.
Australia has Bank Cheques and Teller’s Cheques from non-bank institutions.
However Netherlands and Scandanavia in general has got rid of cheques,
since cheque’s create the problem of duplicates and fakes. A fake bank cheque deposited into a foreign based bank, clears instantly , the cash is transferred out half the world away, its gone !. Instead, Payments large and small are facilitied by the AcceptGiro system. Registered Giro acceptors can suck the funds toward them with ease. What if they fake it ? well you’d have to be real good at faking ( and jail breaking) to become a registered GIRO acceptor. Its just the same telling your utility as bank account to deduct funds from … its just the same as a visa card … they take it… the banks trust these merchants not to enter in fraudulent transactions… same… See, why is there a fee and limit with VISA, when a cheque or GIRO is the same ? Its a TRANSACTION… why does VISA get such a large fee just for a transaction ?
[Paying stuff in Holland]
Sort of. Giro = Postcheque- en Girodienst, a service that was part of the state post/telecom company. The idea was that everyone had an account and you could transfer money easily, facilitated by punched cards. An acceptgiro was a pre-punched card that you would get from utilities etc. You’d put in your account number and sign it, put it in a free pre-paid envelope and mail it in. The money was then transferred from your account to theirs. These days acceptgiros are optically readable. I guess you can still mail them to your bank (all the banks in Holland accept them) but most people just fill in the details online. I guess the next step is a QR code so you don’t have to type anything in.
You can of course fill one of these in with someone else’s account number and fake signature, but they don’t allow businesses to just grab the money from your account.
Which is in fact exactly the thing an “automatische overschrijving” (automatic transfer) does. You authorize a utility or company to do this and they then deduct amounts from your checking account. There are ones that only work once that I think can’t be reversed, but with the regular periodic ones you have 30 days to tell the bank to reverse the transfer. The banks really don’t check for authorizations, so you have to monitor your account to make sure all transfers are legit and correct.
For paying in stores debit cards (with a chip) are very popular and are starting to take over cash. It helps that now with the new contactless cards you don’t have to put in a PIN for small amounts. Credit cards are almost never used in places that don’t cater to tourists, although I think they’re being accepted in more and more places these days.
One of the proclaimed benefits to my American Express is that I can supposedly put a car purchase on it although I believe that’s only at select dealers who have an agreement with AmEx. It was part of the benefits package literature sent to me when I received the card though.
Aside from that, like suranyi, the last time I bought a car we could put some on a card (I think $2k or $3k) but not all of it. Presumably enough for a down payment but not enough to purchase a new car outright. Like others here, we mainly wanted to cycle the purchase through for the points.
I know a story (from decades ago) where someone wanted to buy a new car with actual sash, and this flummoxed the salesman because there was simply no way to put that on the paperwork. Finally, he went to his manager who gave him an exasperated look, then accepted the cash from the customer and wrote a personal check for the car. 
(There was a box on the form for “paid by check”.)
This was basically my experience. I asked how much I could put on the credit card and the dealer said about $5,000. I got a cashier’s check for most of the money and put the remainder (a little less than $5,000) on my card. I probably could have written a personal check but my bank gave me cashier’s checks for free (I think up to four a year) anyway so I figured I do it just in case the dealer preferred it.
God, those are a pain.
We sell money orders where I work, and corporate put a limit on the max amount we will sell to one person that is specifically less than the amount where it becomes mandatory that we file a SAR. (We still have to file them under many other conditions, but this cuts out a lot of pointless nonsense where the transaction did not seem at all suspicious, but exceeded an arbitrary amount.)
However, on the list of things that are supposed to make us suspicious is: if the customer knows what our limit is.
Knowing won’t automatically get a SAR filed on you, but it does require that the clerk make a conscious decision about whether you seemed “suspicious” or not.
The weirdest thing about the SAR: we are prohibited by law from telling the customer that we will be filing one.
The clerk may be required to file an SAR for my suspicious activities, but I’m under no obligation to provide them with information to assist them. If I’m buying a large batch of money orders (under the CTR limit) and they start acting funny and want to start asking me for my name and all that, I’ll thank them for their time and walk away. A SAR still gets filed without any identifying information, which is absolutely pointless.
For the record, the dealer is not allowed to limit the amount of a credit card purchase (maximum transaction limits are prohibited by VISA and Mastercard’s merchant agreements, just like minimums) though I didn’t find this out until after I bought my last car (tried to put $5K down for the credit card points but they would only let me do $3K).
Money orders go as high as you want. I bank with a credit union (so they can’t do cashier’s checks) and have gotten a money order for over $10,000 when I was buying my house. Post Office money orders only go up to $1000, but they’re not the only ones who issue them. (Also my credit union doesn’t charge for money orders over $500).
Why would you worry about getting reported if you’re not doing some kind of money laundering scheme? Typically a car purchase is getting recorded under your name in several ways already, (there’s usually vehicle tax, sales tax, and title transfer, for example), so I don’t see why the additional report of using a large amount of cash would cause a problem.
Actually, the dealer can limit the amount of its credit card transactions and as a customer, there is practically nothing you can do about it. You aren’t a party to the dealer’s merchant agreement and you can’t force the dealer to comply with it. A customer isn’t even entitled to see the merchant agreement so, barring some unusual access to the credit card company or dealer’s files, a customer won’t even know for sure what the agreement says. A customer may believe the dealer has a standard agreement like ones the customer has seen a million times, but the customer can’t be sure that the dealer’s agreement is the same. You can report the dealer’s refusal to the credit card company, and if the credit card company believes the dealer is violating its agreement, the credit card company can take action against the dealer but, let’s face it, that is unlikely to happen before you buy your car. Or perhaps ever. If the car dealer doesn’t want to sell you a car on a credit card, it won’t.
That’s absolutely true, but telling the merchant you’re going to report their violation will generally take care of the problem. At least, if the merchant is smart. Most car dealers are relatively sophisticated and understand what their agreements say.
We recently bought a new car and wanted to pay cash, but the dealer said we would only get the incentives if we financed.
So we financed, and once we had the paperwork requested a pay-off amount and paid it off before the first payment was due.
There’s no issue with a CTR, at all. Perfectly safe. They do not trigger anything, in fact they are not looked at until an investigation on you is underway for something else. (which could be a Tax Audit, but they dont trigger the audit)
Then there’s a SAR- these have triggered things, such as FBI investigations, being put on the No Fly list (so much for that being a good test for gun buyers) or even get your Visa revoked. You do NOT want a SAR file don you. Bad. So, even if you are not* doing some kind of money laundering scheme*- you dont want a SAR. Trust me.
Then there’s the Form 8300. This comes somewhere in between. It’s probably OK.
Yes, they are a pain, but they can really help the FBI, etc.
There is no dollar amount where it becomes mandatory that you file a SAR- either you’re thinking CTR or your companies doing something wrong- likely due to over-zealous regulators.
Yes, absolutely.
Not usually. They are usually a face limit of either $500 or $1000, and each Financial institution can place (or has been required to place by regulators) their own limit on how man of those can be sold.
That’s what I thought, and the poster was worried about a CTR and talking about structuring transactions to avoid getting one filed - which is exactly the kind of thing that triggers a SAR (and possible criminal charges).
That’s not how they worked at my credit union. You go in, fill out a slip like a deposit slip that says how much you want it for and where the money is coming from (cash or an account with them). Then they take it, verify the funds, then print out what looks like an oversized check with ‘money order’ written on it, stamp it with some kind of seal, then hand it to you to carry or mail to the recipient.
OTOH, I just looked at their page now, and it looks like they offer Cashier’s checks and not money orders (unlike 2 years ago when I last dealt with real estate). Whatever regulation forcing them to issue a money order instead of cashier’s checks may have changed, and may also have limited money orders to what you described above.