Outpound's Sell My Impounded Car Blog

Before You Go Into Debt To Rescue Your Car, Do The Math! Your car is sitting in impound. The bill is $2,500. You have $500. Now the panic math begins. Maybe you can put $1,000 on a credit card, borrow $500 from your sister, take a cash advance for the rest and somehow get the car out before another round of storage fees hits. Problem solved, right? Not necessarily. You may have just replaced an...

Your Car May Be Worth More Than The Bill Holding It Hostage Here's a frustrating financial puzzle: your car is sitting in impound, the bill has climbed to $2,400, and you have about $300 available to deal with it. Meanwhile, the vehicle behind that fence may be worth $11,500. So what are you doing? Calling relatives? Checking credit-card balances? Wondering whether the electric company will notice if you're a little late this month? There may...

When The Tow Bill Costs More Than The Car Getting your car impounded is bad enough. Finding out it will cost thousands of dollars to get it back is worse. But there comes a point when the question shouldn't be “How am I going to pay this bill?” It should be: “Would paying this bill be a terrible financial decision?” That's a very different question. Suppose your older vehicle is worth around $3,500. You call...

It’s Worth $15,000! There are expensive mistakes, and then there is potentially walking away from a $15,000 vehicle because you can't come up with $2,000 to get it out of impound. We understand the reaction. Nobody wakes up excited to hand a tow yard a couple thousand dollars. When you call expecting a painful-but-manageable bill and hear a number that sounds more like a mortgage payment, the temptation to say, “Fine. Keep the stupid car,”...

You walk into a tow yard expecting to pay a bill and retrieve your vehicle. But what happens if you don't retrieve it? Can the tow company eventually look at your car, decide you've waited too long and simply make it theirs? The short answer is: under certain circumstances, a towing or storage company can eventually acquire or transfer ownership rights—but it generally cannot simply declare itself the new owner because your vehicle has been...

An impounded car doesn't become “abandoned” simply because its owner hasn't picked it up for a few days. But leave it sitting behind the tow yard fence long enough, and the situation can change from “my car is impounded” to “I may be losing my legal opportunity to recover it.” That's an important distinction because abandonment isn't necessarily about whether you intend to give up the vehicle. It can be determined by state law, required...

Why Do I Still Owe the Loan? Watching an impounded vehicle disappear into the auction process is bad enough. Finding out afterward that the car is gone and the loan may still be very much alive can make an already expensive situation considerably worse. It sounds backward. If you no longer have the car, why would you still have to pay for it? Because the vehicle and the loan attached to it are two different...

You already paid for the tow with your car. So why does the bill keep growing every single day your vehicle sits in the tow yard? Welcome to one of the nastiest surprises of having a vehicle impounded: the tow may happen once, but storage charges can keep piling up daily. In many situations, yes, a towing or impound facility can charge a daily storage fee. Exactly what it can charge, when those charges begin,...

There may be no four words more terrifying to hear about an impounded vehicle than: “It went to auction.” Until that moment, you may have been fighting storage fees, chasing paperwork, waiting for an insurance company, trying to locate a title, dealing with a lienholder or simply trying to scrape together enough money to get the vehicle released. Those problems are frustrating, but at least there may still be a vehicle sitting behind the fence...

When a wrecked vehicle is sitting behind the gates of a tow yard and the owner discovers it may cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to get it released, the tow company usually becomes the immediate villain. They have the vehicle, they are presenting the bill, and storage charges may continue increasing every day. The anger is understandable, but the company holding the vehicle isn't necessarily the company responsible for creating the financial mess. Let's...