Re: STUPID illinois trailer issue~ again
Re: STUPID illinois trailer issue~ again
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I am getting sick and tired of folks selling stuff that they don't legally paper. You come along all caught up in the excitement of the sale and the bricks all fall on you, though you did nothing wrong.
The problem isn't that folks sell things they don't own or don't have papers on, in some states, most it seems, don't title either the boat or the trailer. They never had any paper on it. I bought a boat from PA last spring, the owner had no title, they don't title boats there, or at least they didn't when the thing was last used. It had sat for 24 years in a barn, the original owner died, the property was sold with the boat to a relative. To top that the boat turned up to have a HIN number mistyped on the last registration. I live in NJ, they title boats here, not trailers, and since the registration was 24 years out of date, they wouldn't accept that here. In PA, they wanted the owner to pay up on all the missed years of registration in order to get a current title or current Registration which NJ required. Keep in mind that I also bought the boat for less than $100. I offered to pay the registration but it would have required her to travel pretty far to get all the crap done.
In the end, I finally gave up, scraped off all the numbers on the boat, got a bill of sale from her stating it was her's, it was never registered, and that she had sold it to me. $25 plus the title fee of $60 and I had a title.
I sold the trailer back to a PA resident, PA in turn refused to accept the out of date registration and older title without a bill of sale. The seller was no longer to be found, and I'm not sure if I'd bother her anyhow after all the BS she had to go through for the boat.
I ended up having to sell the boat to a NJ buyer since we don't have titles here.
These states need to all get on the same page, we're talking about $200 boat trailers and quite often the boats aren't worth much more, yet they act like were buying and selling a house or high dollar car.
As to a rusty old trailer not being stolen, I can't agree, I had one disappear last week, it was so rusty the last owner stuffed wood inside the tongue to keep it from snapping in two, and it looked to me like someone pulled out the valve stems and stuffed the tires with old rags and paper and taped up the holes. It was sitting at the end of the driveway, awaiting a date with a blue tip wrench, but someone decided they needed it before I got to it. They did me a favor as it saved me cutting it up to scrap it, but I'm sure if there was a newer one handy that wasn't locked up, that too would have gone away. My only hope is that they load up their boat and take a nice long drive with that wood reinforced tongue and half flat tires.
