Recently I made a post about some things you can do to prepare your house and personal property before you go out on tour. One of the things I said I did was change my vehicle insurance so that I’m not paying out the ass for a car that’s just going to be sitting at my house for three months. Boy, did taking off liability insurance really come back to bite me in the balls.
Alright, last year I went to Mexico for about two and a half months and I figured, “why the hell should I pay full price for my car insurance when it’s just going to be sitting at my house?” I mean, that seems like a good idea, right? Knock down my car insurance costs for those two months then kick it back in when I get back.
So I call up my insurance company and tell them the story. The guy tells me, “yeah, we can just cancel certain things that you won’t be using and then when you get back in town give us a call and we’ll change it back.”
Sounds easy enough, right?
Wrong.
What happened was that Safeco, my insurance company, took off liability and collision but left on comprehenisive (in case of vandalism or a tree falls on it). However, for Louisiana law, when a car insurance company takes liability off your car they have to report it to the DMV. This fucked up my vehicle registration.
Well, it’s the end of the month and I see I need an inspection sticker. So I got to the inspection sticker place and dig out my vehicle registration only to find out that it is expired. Ugh, I go home, get online, try to renew it there – no go. There’s a “flag” on my registration.
Of course now I have to get up early to go to the DMV. This is always a joy on Earth.
I get to the DMV and find out that there is a “flag” on my registration because I either cancelled my insurance or changed insurance. Basically, because I took liability off my vehicle it put a flag on the registration.
You know how much it cost me to get that thing reinstated and updated just so I can get an inspection sticker: A HUNDRED AND FIFTY-EIGHT DOLLARS!!!!
Holy fuck, that’s quite a steep increase from the forty dollars it should’ve been.
I’m so sick of the government trying to milk me for every god damn penny they can get. Why does it cost 158 dollars just to get a piece of paper, run it through the printer, and pass me the paper over the counter? That’s all it is. I had documentation proving my vehicle was insured the entire amount of time but just cause I had liability taken off because it was going to be sitting under my carport I had to fork over 158 bucks.
For what? What was the 158 dollars for? Punishment? Is that why it’s so expensive? A processing fee? Really? Is that how expensive electricity is for someone to hit the “Enter” key on a keyboard to make my registration legit?
So anyway, unless you’re going to be on a long extended tour it would probably not make a lot of sense to do this with your vehicle. I might have come out about even when all is said and done, but was it really worth my time to go to the DMV and have to deal with the troll people?
