I’m going to pick up a couple of cars from Alabama, and bring them back to Mississippi. What do I need in order to get title’s on these vehicles? A trip to the Lee County (MS) tag office gets me the skinny:
1) In Alabama, cars sold prior to 1974 don’t have Documents of Title. So there’s nothing to really transfer from Alabama to Mississippi. But there’s no reason to get a Title Document in Alabama because it’s fairly easy to get one in Mississippi:
2) In order to get a Document of Title in Mississippi, the state requires either TWO Bills of Sale and ONE Tag Registration, or ONE Bill of Sale and TWO Tag Registrations. I have one Bill of Sale from the previous owner in Alabama, and when I get a tag in Mississippi, that will count as one Tag Registration. So then I need only wait ’til next year and get another Tag Registration, THEN I can apply for a Document of Title.
I suppose I could have had a friend be the buyer of the Beetle from Alabama, then have him sign a Bill of Sale to me. That would get me TWO Bills of Sale and the when I got the Tag, I could apply for a Document of Title immediately. I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with that, but it doesn’t really matter.
An interesting thing about all this — a Document of Title (the piece of paper that people associate with car ownership) is just a piece of paper that makes it easy to explain who owns the vehicle. It’s not the actual “ownership” of the vehicle. If you own something (like a car), you have ‘title’ to it. The paper is not the ownership, it’s merely documentation of ownership.