This week Bailey and I bought a car here in Manila. I always get quite nervous about buying a used vehicle, probably because my budget always requires me to buy something with high miles, that has been well seasoned. This time was especially stressful since I don’t speak much Tagalog (yet) and the paperwork process is very foreign to me. Once we decided on the car we want to buy, we paid the owner in cash. This was quite a pile of cash since the largest denominations available are the equivalent of a $20 bill. Once payment was made, we started the process of changing the registration over to my name.
The first thing we did was get the Bill of Sale notarized. No big deal, except they needed to see a “tax certificate” which I didn’t have. So we left the notary office in search of someone who could issue this certificate. We found the place and waited for the registrar to show up to work. We were issued our certificates, then returned to the notary and waited about 45 minutes for the papers to be notarized. With our papers in hand, we went to get the vehicle emissions tested. We pulled into a shop and the car passed the test without any trouble. The same emissions shop sold us liability insurance for the vehicle which is also required for registration. There was one policy to choose from so it was pretty easy to decide what to do.
From there it was off to the Police headquarters where we needed to have the vehicle inspected. The inspection station was a tent in a lot paved with rubble from some demolished structure. There was a pile of trash burning nearby, and we sat in the outside waiting room and waited for the inspection. There was a whole stack of paperwork to be done and it was quickly processed and we made our payment. Then we waited over an hour and a half for our change. Once we received our change we stood in another line and showed our paperwork and receipt to an official who then carried them across the rubble lot to someone else who signed them 30 minutes later.
With these documents now in our hands we had to switch the registration papers. So we got in the car and drove two and a half hours to the provincial office where the vehicle was originally registered. It was at this office that we transfered the ownership of the vehicle to my name. We waited one and a half hours for them to call my name and tell me that they cannot register it because the owner’s signature on the bill of sale did not match his signature on the registration certificate which he signed more than 8 years ago. In one signature he signed with his full name and the other he left out his middle initial. At this point I would have been hung out to dry if it weren’t for the owner being by side for this whole process.
He then had to fill out paperwork to put a new signature on file so that they could clear my paperwork. Once they had the updated signature we waited another hour and the paperwork was done. We drove all the way home and I arrived back at the house at 10:30pm, only 16 1/2 hours after I left to start the process. When it was all said and done I decided that I would never again complain about the line at the California Department of Motor Vehicles! I don’t know what I would have done without the owner there with me the whole way. Normally the buyer is just left to fend for himself.