GAP insurance will not help you when selling an “upside-down” vehicle. This insurance is to cover the entire cost of an upside-down vehicle that has been totalled in a wreck.

Example:
You owe $23,000 on a car that is worth $20,000 and you have full coverage in case of accidents. If you total your car, the insurance will pay you what the car is worth ($20,000), not what you owe($23,000). The gap insurance is designed to pay that $3000 gap in your full coverage.

Back to the grind… Our vacation is over (more on that later) and I’m more than a few days late with last week’s roundup, so… Without further ado, here’s a quick look at things that caught my eye from across the MoneyBlogNe…

If you use a loan to buy a car (or house, etc), it has a lien on it for the amount of the balance due on the note, and your ownership rights are bound by any other terms in the note. Unless you buy your car through an explicit “rent to own” arrangement, you own the car as soon as you sign the purchase agreement.

The reason I don’t like muddying “ownership” discussions in this way is because some people have been known to exploit this type of “non-ownership” argument to extort terms out of people that they wouldn’t get otherwise. You don’t see this as much with cars but you do see it with people trying to buy houses from people in over their head.