Soldiers and Sailors Relief Act/Car Lease

[villanelle]

When you PCS overseas, govt will store your car at no cost. Indoor heated/cooled storage, they claim to start and move it once a month. Delivered to your next homeport or you can pick it up and drive it. So even if you buy a beater, you'll have something to drive when you get back stateside until you have time to get something more permanent.

I did it for 2 1/2 years and had zero issues upon return. Just had to put in a new battery after I picked it up.

We were in Japan before Germany, so I know about the storage. We did have a dead battery when we received the car in Germany (shipped from the storage place in San Diego when we left Japan), but other than that it was fine. We have that car now in Germany and it will be shipped back to San Diego. But I may have found a job for our time there, in which case we really need two cars. So this would likely be a second car, with the first one going to storage, again, when we leave for Japan. It's already old (2000) and will be 19 years old by the time we return from Japan, but it seems worth storing so we have something to drive when we get back, as you mentioned. Even if we sell it 3 months later, it buys us time to car shop.

 

[ltedge46]

Got it. Right before we left Japan we bought a new car through BMW's overseas program and had it delivered to Norfolk. So we picked up our stored car in Seattle, drove across country and picked up our new car from the dealer in Norfolk. Definitely nice to have something waiting for you upon arrival so you don't have to worry about renting or buying something under pressure. When you really need to buy a car, doesn't leave a lot of negotiating room. Sounds like picking up something cheap or leasing something for the 8 months and unloading it just prior to PCS is the way to go.

 

[villanelle]

Would they not deliver your stored car to Norfolk, or did you just choose to drive it from Seattle for some reason? We don't have experience with that end of the storage process since we arranged from Japan to have it shipped from San Diego to Germany. It'll be quite a few years before we have to deal with delivery of a stored car, but I'm curious as I thought they sent it to your next duty station.

 

[webmaster]

Would they not deliver your stored car to Norfolk, or did you just choose to drive it from Seattle for some reason? We don't have experience with that end of the storage process since we arranged from Japan to have it shipped from San Diego to Germany. It'll be quite a few years before we have to deal with delivery of a stored car, but I'm curious as I thought they sent it to your next duty station.

I was in Hawaii, PCSing to Japan. I looked into the car storage option, and they were going to store it in California. I elected to just leave it at my parent's house instead.

That USAA car selling service is good info, I will keep that handy! Thanks.

 

[ltedge46]

Would they not deliver your stored car to Norfolk, or did you just choose to drive it from Seattle for some reason? We don't have experience with that end of the storage process since we arranged from Japan to have it shipped from San Diego to Germany. It'll be quite a few years before we have to deal with delivery of a stored car, but I'm curious as I thought they sent it to your next duty station.

They would have delivered to Norfolk, but we had left some stuff at my parents house in Seattle (previous duty station was Whidbey), so I drove it across. They will deliver it to any duty station you want, port of Tacoma was a convenient place for me to pick it up, actual storage warehouse was in San Francisco so it rode a truck or ship up to Tacoma.