You’ll have a lot on your mind when you have a serious accident and your car is declared a total loss. You or a passenger might have been injured and require medical care or a period of rehabilitation. You may have to talk to your attorney or to law enforcement personnel about the details of the accident. You’ll definitely have to contact your insurance agent, and there will be a great deal of paperwork in order to make a claim against your insurance, or the insurance of the other driver.

Because your car has been declared totaled, you’ll have to arrange for alternate transportation until you can buy another car. The need for temporary transportation can drag on a bit if there are a lot of details before you get your insurance settlement. When everything else is taken care of, you’re left with one last detail. Your totaled car is probably still at the tow yard, and needs to be removed. That’s when you’ll have to decide if you want to try to sell parts from the car on your own, or let an expert sell totaled car parts for you.

Image by Matthias Ripp Via Flickr

Making All the Money In One Transaction

For most people, selling your totaled car to a business like SellTheCars.com is the smart way to get rid of a car that’s too far gone to be repaired. You might be surprised to learn how much your car is worth, even though it’s been declared totaled by your insurance company. It’s important to sell the totaled car right away after the accident instead of waiting until you strip a few parts off. Auto salvage companies base the quote they give you on the amount of money they can recover from the wrecked car, and that includes all the parts that were on it just before it was declared totaled. If they can’t be sure of exactly what parts are on the car, or what damage might have been done to other parts when components were removed by amateur mechanics, they can only offer you the value of your car as scrap metal. That’s not nearly as much as you could earn if the car is offered for salvage without taking anything off it first. Selling your totaled car to an auto salvage yard is like hiring an expert to sell all the parts on your totaled car for you instead of doing it yourself.

Do You Want to Be in the Auto Parts Business?

If you decide to have the car towed to your driveway in order to take it apart to sell the parts, you’re really going into the auto parts business. You’ll be subject to the same problems and regulations that anyone who sells auto parts operates under. Because you don’t do that kind of work every day, you’ll be unlikely to make as much money as a professional would when taking the car apart to sell it as used auto parts. While you might be able to do fairly well on a few easy-to-sell parts like tires or a catalytic converter, there are literally hundreds of parts on a car that are worth good money. To sell everything you need to be tied into a large network of dealers that are on the lookout for parts. These networks carry parts from many different sources, and are relied upon by mechanics and dealers as places to find everything they need right away. Because you only have parts from one car, and you’ll sell the most valuable parts right away, the chances that you’ll be able to sell every valuable component on your totaled car in a reasonable period of time are quite small. You might get stuck with a half-assembled car on your property for a long time.

Running a Junkyard Might Be a Problem

If you live a residential district in a major metropolitan area or suburb, it can be against local laws to keep a junk car in your yard for long periods. Once you start removing parts from your car, the town you live in will consider your property an unlicensed junkyard. This can lead to an order to remove the junk car immediately. Shortening the amount of time you have to work on the totaled car will make it impossible for you to recover the total value of the parts on the car. Even if the totaled car parts project doesn’t lead to a problem with the local zoning laws, it can be a source of friction with your neighbors. No one likes living next to a junkyard, even if the junkyard only has one car in it.

Don’t Forget Transportation Costs

When you’re trying to decide whether to sell parts from your totaled car or sell it whole to a salvage company, you need to take transportation costs into account. At the very least, you’ll be forced to pay for towing your totaled car from the tow yard to your property, and then you’ll have to pay to have it towed away to the scrapyard when you’re done stripping the auto parts from its chassis. That means that the first several hundred dollars you earn by selling auto parts will be eaten up by the transportation costs for the car itself. Once all the valuable parts are stripped from your car, it does still have scrap metal value, but only if you manage to get it to the scrapyard. True scrap yards don’t usually have the same free towing deals that auto salvage yards offer.

If you’re a shade-tree mechanic, and enjoy taking a car apart, you might be able to make good money selling parts that you salvage from a totaled car. For the average person, it can be quite challenging, and you might end up doing a lot of work and having little to show for it. When you’re trying to decide whether to sell totaled car parts on your own, you should look at salvage companies as a way to have a professional sell auto parts for you. They’re a lot more experienced at the procedure, and instead of waiting for your money as you wait for customers to respond to your advertising, you can have the entire sum in your hand as soon as you sign over the wreck.