The rant about gifting someone a car for free - I wish I could take it back!

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Prepping the emigration

As buying a car was already an absolute nightmare in Budapest, as a foreigner who doesn't speak Hungarian, I was absolutely sure that selling one would be just as bad. I had enough stuff to take care of like working, emptying the home at the right pace and making sure that there were no open bank accounts or debts. I did a fabulous job if I may say so myself, I had everything under control and I never doubted that everything was going to be ready in time.

To make my life easier, I soon decided that some things were not worth the stress and one of these things was selling the car. I was dealing with people wanting to buy (or getting it for free) stuff from me daily for so many months that it drove me nuts, especially considering the rudeness of a lot of these people and the waste of time answering them and waiting for them not to show up. I was fed up with this stuff early on in the process but I didn't have the luxury to give away everything for free that early on as leaving it all behind also means you have to buy everything new after the emigration. A lot of cheap stuff is still expensive all together!

No dealing with people that want to rip you off anyway

I had no desire whatsoever to deal with these guys that buy up cars and then trying to scam you into giving it away for free. After all, I started to value my time a lot during these prepping months, I can only spend my time once and I sure wasn't going to give away my time to these people and ending up being frustrated for hours afterwards myself (costing more time even, lol).

The options to get rid of the car that I was looking at was a) give it away to someone, let them register it to their name while we are still there and then it's done on our part OR b) let some car dump pick it up for a small fee so you know paperwork is probably done immediately (at least it works like that in Holland) and you don't have to worry about the person you're dealing with not registering it.

Giving the car away

A former colleague of my boyfriend was going to work abroad and when discussing our emigration, the car was mentioned. I like this person, so does my boyfriend so we thought you know what, if you register it to your name at least we know it's someone trustworthy and we don't have to worry. Not having to worry and deal with stupid people is worth more than getting back a little money at this point so we decided to offer the car to him even though it meant that we would be without a car for a month before leaving. At least I could wipe it off the list early.

Constant change

I arranged the last day of kindergarten for my daughter because it was too far by public transport she could say goodbye some weeks later, days before he was going to get the car from us. And then after she already said goodbye, things changed. He was not going to leave until weeks later. Well, thank you for informing us, I could have let her in kindergarten weeks longer, I was not amused to be honest. But ok, it is what it is now anyway so we just enjoyed a few more weeks with the car instead of being annoyed by this change.

Then close to the date that he was going to pick it up for his daughter (apparently he was going to give it to her) the request came to leave the date open. She didn't have the registration money yet (I believe it was close to 180 bucks including some other fees you pay in advance) and she said you can just leave it open and fill it in later. I said no, we aren't going to do this, and at that moment my gut feeling warned me that I should be careful as this smelled fishy. Trust me when I say I can totally understand certain situations where suddenly you're put without funds, we've been there too, remember? But the whole way this was handled felt strange and off to me, this was the point where my gut woke me up to warn me be careful here.

Finally D-Day

When he finally came to pick up the car and of course fill in the paperwork, he tried to let the date open after all, I stepped in and said we aren't going to do that, we are going to fill it in as is, and if she wants to change something on her end, that's her thing but I'm not cooperating with this. I remember having a little push back from my boyfriend when I interfered here because he knows this guy as a trustworthy person as well as being one dealing with hardships maybe to the same level as we had once and he felt for him. I do too but that doesn't mean that we are going to give away our car for free AND then risk getting billed afterwards or maybe find fines in my boyfriend's name etc.

Some little extra info here is maybe needed because the other family members are a different type of people, I met the other daughter several times and I always had a bad feeling with her, I believe from what I've been told that all the ladies in the family are leeches. We have told this guy several times that it NEEDS to be taken care of as we want to move on and not deal with shit on the Hungarian end of this because we are done and leaving. He promised there would not be any issue. But it has shown in the past months he has no idea that his daughter can't be trusted.

We moved to Spain

Months later, we get a bill for road tax. We paid the previous quarter just weeks before we gave the car away so this could not be correct, if any, we'd be getting back money from the two previous months instead of getting billed for the next quarter. This was when alarm bells went off and I knew immediately that I had a gut feeling for a reason, as always. My boyfriend is still reminding me of the fact that it can be X or Y but I already connected all the dots by reading things and by the fact that this daughter doesn't provide the proof of registration on her name after 3 requests.

Strange answers

Not only does she respond simply with "that is weird", without providing proof (which is the easiest way to end the conversation on her part and for us to send proof to the department where this may have been handled wrongly (because a few days ago that was still something I considered being the issue), she doesn't answer anymore first. When requested again, she states that the person selling the car still needs to pay taxes. Which sounded odd to us, but when we received back an email from the tax department, in the first part you can only come to this conclusion as well, BUT after this paragraph the info also states that if the person that bought the car is registering it to their name within the mandatory 15 days max, the person selling the car is exempted from paying tax from the next calendar month. This of course, makes more sense.

Heck, I wouldn't even care if we didn't get back these 2 months because I already knew they can't send it back due to not having a Hungarian bank account anymore. It's not about getting back those funds, it's about her using that line to bullshit us into believing she has registered it without showing proof. It's actually all things together, the strange way this all went at the start, her trying to convince us to add no date and then now weird responses.

Ungrateful person!

Now, I don't know about you, but I once got a car from my boyfriend at the time. It was a half-rusted car and only cost 150 euros :) the brakes needed replacement and it needed to have the mechanical check to be allowed on the road. I was FREAKING happy with this car even in that state and drove it for 2 more years until it didn't get through the technical testing, receiving back the same amount at the car dump, lol.

Compare that happiness with this ungrateful chick, who by the way never even said thank you during any of the phone calls we had when her dad was arranging the paperwork at our home! That car was more than 2000 euros and only a year in our possession and we asked nothing in return but to get it registered in time. That's all! I seriously feel that some people really should get hit by the karma train rather sooner than later! I know that I wish we had this car here with us and if I knew what I know now, we'd probably taken the risk and drove it here. I feel a bit sick that we gave it to someone that apparently didn't even honor our one request, which is even mandatory by law..

Waiting for the tax office

To confirm that it's never been transferred to another name, at this point, I'm 99% sure that this is the case, because if not, why would she refrain from showing proof. I'm probably going to spend too much time to find out what the best way to go is here, but it may be worth it. If we have to pay taxes for a car that's not ours and possible even find fines in the future (if this isn't already the case because our previous landlord was not even checking his mail monthly), well then I personally rather have the police visiting her to get it out of there. Of course, at this point, I have no clue how this stuff works over there and if this is even an option, we'll take it one step at a time, we can prove we sent in the form, we have a signed document and her data, we were out of the country from end of May so if anything were to happen while on my boyfriend's name, we will be able to prove that it was not us. Still shitty as this stuff is exactly what we wanted to avoid, and now we're dealing with this for several days in a row after all as it's a nightmare to navigate through the Hungarian systems.

Although I've been quite angry that someone is this ungrateful, I will now just let it go and wait for answers to see what the next possible step will be.

Thanks for reading my rant :) And have a lovely weekend!