SS# with cash purchase

The dealer has no reason to ask for your SS Number unless you are applying for financing. If you were paying with actual cash currency, it would require reporting to the IRS, assuming the amount was over $10K. I suspect that the dealer is trying to run your credit numbers to try to sell you on their financing, which is a profit center.

I have been beating the bushes in the North Texas area for a Prius, and I had the unfortunate experience of visiting Toyota of Dallas. Those guys would give carnival grifters a bad name. They tried to get me to fill out a credit application before I had ever made an offer on a car, which I never did do, and told me it was legally required after Sept 11 to make certain I wasn't a terrorist. What a crock. Many Toyota dealers are all about selling the monthly payment, and they need your credit information to do that. Good for them...bad for you.

Don't give them your SSN. Just pay with a cashier's check or, better yet, a wire transfer. Most car buying transactions require such payments, but I was pleasantly surprised when I bought my last car, an Acura, that they offered to take a personal check. What a refreshing difference to the average car buying, and particularly the Toyota buying, experience.

Felton the Frustrated
Hot on the trail of a 2005, Pkg 6

 

Maybe I'm too much of a Belts-plus-suspenders person, but I think I'd write down those long forgettable passowrds and put it somewhere safe. In case I have a hard drive crash or some other disaster.

I also love that Firefox. I'm sure we all cry a few tears for Mr. Gates losing income as a result of Firefox use, tho'. Poor fella.

 

i also use the firefox/mozilla password corral but store a copy offline on paper.

and as far as SSN, i paid cash for my car and had to give the driver's license or SSN, my choice, but it was for my plates which i believe is a state requirement.
also had to show proof of insurance which surprised me.

 

oh this is such a sore subject for me. I had a similar experience. Talked to the dealer on the phone and negotiated on the price. Went to the dealer and offered to pay with personal check, insurance company check and balance on the credit card. The first disagreement was that they will not charge more than $2000 on the credit card...i agreed, then the manager comes up to me and says that because i'm writing a personal check, I will HAVE to fill out a credit app and there will be a credit check.....for the same reasons stated above that I can put a stop payment on the check and then they can get their money from the finance company I found it totally unacceptable, I'm closing on my house this week and there was no way I was going to let thm do a credit chck at this crucial time. At the end, I told them that its their choice that they can either see me walk away and by the time that I get a cashiers check frm the bank, i might change my mind and i'll go to another dealership or i could drive away in a car tonight, and i think that put things in a different prespective....and they finally agreed....so i paid personal check, credit card and insuracne check and drove the car home. However, did the same for my girlfriends 05 Acura TL and the dealership had no problmes taking $4000 in trade in and a $29000 personal check.

That was the only bad part about my Prius acquisiton process.

 

Hello Again, Felton....

I received your response re: Dallas-Plano Prius Meetup Group. I will post another notice online here, but you'd be very welcome to come "until" you get your new Prius.

 

Finally a subject I'm an expert on.

There is no such thing as a risk-free payment method, strictly speaking. Even cash can be counterfeit. Here's some information about different levels of risk for different payment methods.

Wire transfers are as close to risk-free as you can get. To receive a wire transfer, the sender must know which bank account to send funds to. The (small) risk of fraud there is that the sender could do something illegal with that bank account information. They could create a forged check, or submit an ACH draft debiting money from the recipient (dealership) instead. Because most people don't know how to do this, and these actions create direct and obvious evidence of fraud, it's not likely. Someone had better have escape-the-country-with-the-money type plans in place before doing this. Because business accounts are only given 24 hours to detect and reverse unauthorized ACH transactions (personal/consumer accounts get ...what, 30 days?) business accounts are more susceptible than consumer accounts to these fraudulent ACH drafts.

Cash is pretty close to risk-free also. Big buckets of cash might be counterfeit. To mitigate that risk, the dealership should probably take the cash to their bank and ask them to count and verify it, and then deposit it into their business account.

Direct ACH debit (either through a direct ACH program with a payment processing company, or through a check conversion service like Telecheck or CompletePay) isn't risk-free either. When you submit an ACH draft, you still have to wait for the bank to receive and respond to it. If the ACH draft rejects (NSF, account closed, account on hold, etc) you might not find out about it for three or four business days. Guarantee check services (like Telecheck or CompletePay) help merchants out by running some fraud and credit checks, so they can guarantee payment. Those companies decline a lot of checks, for reasons as simple as check-number-too-low, but if they approve a check and the ACH draft rejects, the merchant still gets paid. Also, those guarantees only apply to certain reject codes. If an item rejects because the customer submitted a stop-payment for that item, the guarantee service probably won't cover that.

Check guarantee services usually charge a percentage of the sale amount, too, so either the merchant (dealership) will be paying a percentage of your personal check to eliminate risk, or they're assuming risk just the same as if they drove the check to their bank and deposited it immediately.

Credit card processing is more convenient for customers (which is why merchants tolerate it -- it enables customers to buy things they wouldn't otherwise be able to buy) but it's more expensive than nearly any other method, and still has significant risk. When a merchant processes a credit card sale and gets an electronic approval code (which comes from the bank which issued that credit card), they are at least assured that this card is capable of paying the requested funds. That doesn't mean the merchant gets to keep the funds. These payment transfer organizations give cardholders chargeback rights in certain dispute situations, so if some kind of dispute comes up, the bank might take money away from the dealer at a later date.

The dealership can protect themselves by filing a UCC-1 lien on your new car with the state. When your payment has aged long enough that the dealership knows the payment can't be reversed, they only have to submit a UCC-3 termination and send you the title.

(Then again, maybe that doesn't make a lot of sense -- the UCC-1 would allow the dealership to repossess your car, but at that point it's a used car and is much less valuable.)

This is almost definitely too-much-info, but I hope this helps!

--Spence

 

Day before Christmas I tried three Prius autos, gave them a down payment of 10K by check and drove one away. Into next year I transferred funds into another MM Acct and wrote a different check for the balance. No SS# required, I would not have given it. This was at Roseville Toyota at the Automall, in the Sacramento area. The checks all cleared around the 15 of Jan. A pleasant experience all around. I presume they called my Credit Union, that would have been fine with me.