Buying a Used Car in Italy

One of the first things you learn in Italy is that everything takes time. If you only find happiness in the end result...then you're going to be miserable here. We're learning to enjoy the process.

The Linguist is trying to buy a used car. I thought you might enjoy a peek at what this entails.

After looking at the 2 cars currently for sale by Americans leaving the country, he contacted this Italian guy who's a mechanic and buys used cars, fixes them and sells them to desperate Americans. To get the car he'll go to Vicenza on Thursday because that is the day that someone from Ferrara will drive up there to pick up the mail). Someone will pick him up at our hotel (since we still don't have our van), and they'll drive to the first base that's about 20 minutes away and switch to a government vehicle. Then they'll drive to the Army post in Vicenza another hour and a half away. 

He'll get dropped off somewhere there, pick a car and have to go to the bank and use our ATM card to withdraw 400 euro for a down payment. It seems that the ATM on the base is the only place we can withdraw money without paying a foreign transaction fee. As a side note, we found out the hard way that the base, although American as far as our bank is concerned, is considered foreign by our credit card and so each purchase is charged an extra 3% to cover the 1% foreign transaction fee. Seems like fuzzy math to me. In addition, the dollar isn't particularly healthy here and for every $100 we take out, we get about 75 euro. Yikes!  

Anyway, back to the car place, where they'll give him a loaner to drive back down here. The next day he'll  go wait in line to get a yellow insurance card. Hopefully he'll either be able to communicate his point or there will be someone who speaks English there. Unlike the bigger cities in Italy, folks here really don't speak English. Good thing the Linguist is who he is and can take care of that because in Italy you can't drive a car, even for 10 seconds, without that yellow insurance card. We pay some sort of fee that then allows the yellow insurance card people to communicate with our insurance company in the U.S. so that we can be billed with our regular insurance payment. Wouldn't want to miss the bill, now would we?

After that, he'll drive back to Vicenza on the Autostrada (highway where people drive really fast...not bad except for the getting on...and when large trucks try to move over into your lane while you're in it in the same space!) and get a bank draft for the remaining cost of the car. But to get a bank draft you have to have a bank in Italy. Fortunately, we actually opened an account on the base the first week we were here, but it only has 20 euro in it. (I have just a vague recollection of that day...we were pretty jet lagged...I can see the face of the girl who helped us and hear the "uh" on the end of every word she said, Seriously...that's all I remember though. I hope she gave us a packet of instructions somewhere.)

Anyway, today I initiated the bank request that will enable us to transfer money to the Italian account. That will take at least 2 days. Then we can transfer money by sending an e-mail and waiting another 2 days for it to actually happen. Then we wait in line and pay $7 to speak to the teller and we can get a money order. In an effort to speed the process I asked USAA to increase our ATM withdrawal limit by 800% so that we can just take the cash out at the ATM. I guess we'll see what happens...

The funny thing is that we took the easy way out by using the American bank on the base! We hear that things would really have been complicated if we'd opened a real Italian bank account. Apparently they never let you close it because there's always a chance that another bill might come...Huzzah for "easy"!