The Harrowing Tale Of Car Registration IN Georgia: Part 2
Now, back to it. We get in there, ready to register our cars, and have this nightmare over with. Again, we looked at doing mine first, and the final charge was $350, which was much higher than we expected. I asked why, and they explained that Georgia does taxes for cars by paying a one-time ad valorem tax based on the vehicle's value, and then every year after, you pay the $2.00 processing fee to re-register.
Again, we have a couple of problems with this. For one thing, they estimated my car to be worth $7,800. If you can find someone who will pay that much for a 12-year-old Toyota Camry with 218,000 miles on it, please send me their number, and I will sell it right now. We plan on getting me a new car either this year or next, which means we will be repaying this tax at a much higher rate in the next 18 months. And even if we keep my car for the entirety of being stationed in Georgia, we will still be here for only three years. That felt incredibly wrong to us, and we were confident there was some exception for the military.
They explained that we could choose not to pay the ad valorem tax and instead be subject to sales tax. They did a poor job of explaining that we would not have to pay the sales tax, so we were under the impression that they could come after us for that. So, if the choice was 3% of the car's value today or 8% tomorrow, it makes sense to pay today. We just felt wrong about this whole process, and by this point, the office had been closed for 30 minutes, so there was no one else to call. They told us to come back on Monday, and we would sort it out.
Thankfully, we knew that amount of money was wrong. I am so grateful that we didn't just pay it because we would never have gotten the money back if we had done that. We talked to many friends, and none of them had to pay this tax, although some had to fight harder than others to avoid it. My husband went in on Monday and talked to the shirt, who was very familiar with our situation. She had heard more and more of these issues coming out of the office we went to and armed us with the forms and information we needed to finish this process.
Part of the problem we were facing is that 90% of people at this base live in Houston County, which is where the base is located. That office is more well-versed in military circumstances. We don't live in that county, though. Georgia is very county-specific, so we had to go to our districted place. The woman at that office even told us, "We just don't get a lot of military up here." I find that incredibly hard to believe since we live just 15 minutes from the base, and I know that will be shifting since, price-wise, our money went a lot further in Bibb County than it would have in Houston. I think we'll see more and more people moving to that area in the future, so I am glad we have this information to share.
That form, which was the same form they poorly explained on Friday, exempted my husband from paying the tax. It also exempted me from paying it and from having to change my driver's license. So we got my husband's car registered, and I clarified that they would register me if I returned with my NC license. They said yes, so I am changing it back. They said they didn't think I could just undo the process, and I told them not to worry because I would figure it out.
We left that office after 8 hours of total work with one car registered and the process of changing my license. It would probably be a pain in the butt to do, but certainly less of a pain than if I had to switch everything over to Georgia. The next day, I called the North Carolina DMV to learn the process. They have a specific department dedicated to military families (yay, NC!), and the guy on the phone told me I would just have to surrender the Georgia license and get my NC one reissued. It'll probably involve waiting at the DMV for a couple of hours, and I had to wait until the plastic Georgia license came in (which I just got, so I'll be handling that in two weeks when I go home for my brother's graduation).
This was an incredibly painful process that should not have been one. We should be able to walk into an office and assume that the people we are working with have the correct information. People working in those fields, especially those near a military base, must be informed about the people in their community. I understand that we do not live in the same county as the base in Georgia, but we live within 15 minutes of it. And Georgia has 13 military bases across the state. That's enough for anyone in a regulated service sector, such as car registration, to be aware. We shouldn't have had to deal with this. It sucked. We got through it, and the rest should be pretty smooth. We did learn more about our rights as a military family, though. We identified a problem in this area that incoming people need to be warned about so they can sail through the hoops we bumped into.