RANTINGS FROM THE DMV 2

I promise not to be so wordy today.
One of the common misconceptions about tag renewal is that you have a ten day grace period to RENEW your car tag. This information is bogus, and I would like to ring the neck of the person who started it. My least favorite day of the tag month is the first day because I hear all day long, "Fifteen dollars for just one day!"
Yes, friend, you will pay a fifteen dollar late penalty for even one day of lateness. For each vehicle. That can get pretty expensive. Some of our wellfare friends have managed a way around this system. LISTEN CAREFULLY: If a vehicle is in INOPERABLE condition, you can sign a waiver stating that that vehicle was not able to be driven. This includes flat tire, dead batteries, blown motors, transmissions. Whatever would cause your vehicle to be INOPERABLE. We don't require a copy of a bill from a mechanic's shop either, although in a few cases, we were asked by the STATE dept to obtain one. This waiver will free you from the late penalty, but you are still liable for any taxes (and possibly tag fees) and interest that have accrued in the time that you have not used your car. You can sign this waiver, but be sure not to purjurize yourself...it might come back to haunt you.
The best thing to do if you plan to use this waiver is to admit that the vehicle is late up front and state that the car has been inoperable. UP FRONT. Nothing crawls up the skin more of your tag clerk than to hear "Why is it so much?". Scenario: Two months after your tag expires you walk in thinking that you will pay the $26.59 that is on your renewal card. The clerk announces that your price is $42.35 after she has processed everything, and ONLY THEN do you argue about the price. "Why so much when it hasn't been driven?" The clerk is not required to ask you, in fact, she is required not to ask you whether or not you have been driving the car due to impairment. If you don't say anything, she won't know. Again, she doesn't have her crystal ball in front of her, so the more information she has up front, the better the transaction will go.
I touched yesterday on insurance. There is a waiver that you sign stating you have insurance on the vehicle. You could lie if you want to purjurize yourself, but the great STATE has a way of finding out cancellations in policies and any tickets you might accrue, especially tickets for driving without insurance. This will come back to haunt you eventually. The STATE department will send you a questionnaire asking if you had insurance on your vehicle on a specific date in time. No response will be assumed as an admission of guilt, your tag would be suspended and the reinstatement fee begins at $100. If you send in a response, however, your reinstatement will depend on response. Statements like "I didn't have insurance because I couldn't afford it at the time" will earn you a suspension...I use that one because I have actually seen it before. Even if you drop insurance because you traded vehicles and you swapped your policy over to the new car, you are still at risk for getting one of this forms. As long as you had insurance at the time in question, and you have current insurance, you will be all right.
Now don't let the tag office in your county tell you that you have to handle your suspension in Montgomery, unless your situation is extremely special. Most of these reinstatements can be handled in your county DMV. There is one county that some of my readers live in that tell their patrons to come to my county to get their reinstatement taken care of, and the STATE requires that each county handles their own...this is not to be confused with reinstatement of a suspended driver's license. I don't profess to know much about DL renewal, but in that instance, you would have to go to another office to have your DL reinstated. The best thing to do in that case is to CALL first before you take off a whole day of work to drive all over three counties. Two ladies did that yesterday. JUST CALL!
That sounds like enough today. Maybe I'll rant on titles tomorrow!