John practices law in the Portland, OR, suburb of Lake Oswego, where he focuses on tax and estate planning, business organizations and transactions, and representation of collector-car owners. He is a past president of the Oregon region of the Porsche Club of America and served as the chairman of the PCA’s 2006 parade. His collection includes two Porsches, a Ferrari, an Alfa, a Lotus, a BMW daily driver, a John Deere tractor — and one increasingly famous Jaguar E-type. This month’s “You Write, We Read” on p. 20 is full of SCMer advice on whether Draneas should restore his Jag.
By now, everyone knows the collector car market has softened. The harder question is what will happen next.
If you liken the collector car market to the stock market, you should be bullish. Every time the stock market has lost substantial value, as it recently did after the Brexit vote, it has quietly bounced back to regain the lost value — and then some. To you, today’s collector car market is a buying opportunity.
If you see the collector car Read More
Legal Files” previously reported (May 2014, p. 38) about a lawsuit filed by Domenico Idoni concerning the “Real McCoy” Corvette. This March, the lawsuit came to an end, with judgment entered in favor of Chuck Ungurean, the owner of the Corvette.
The Real McCoy is a 1956 Chevrolet Corvette SR prototype that Chevrolet built to race. John Finch ran it in the 1956 12 Hours of Sebring, finishing 1st in class and 9th overall. That victory cemented the Corvette’s position Read More
There have been several stories too big to fit into one “Legal Files” column, but the biggest of them all is the 2004 Ferrari Enzo that Stefan Eriksson crashed into a power pole at 199 miles per hour on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, CA.
That story was in “Legal Files” in September 2006 (p. 28) and October 2006 (p. 26), and it resurfaced in the March 2007 (p. 30) and November 2007 (p. 36) issues.
Photographs of the Read More
Tax planning time is usually the end of the year. But this year, between the uncertainties of the presidential election, the IRS working on eliminating some of our favorite tax-planning techniques, the current softness in the collector car market, and interest rates possibly going up, it makes sense for the savvy collector to start early on tax planning.
You have probably noticed that income tax rates have gone up in the past couple of years. The maximum Read More
The ink was barely dry on “When Restorations Go Bad” (March 2016, p. 42) when Legal Files received an email from George Medynski: “Nice article. But call me anytime if you want the other side of the story.”
I’m always happy to start a quest with a thrown gauntlet, so I gave Medynski a call.
Medynski is the founder and owner of Tuxedo Motor Sport in Tuxedo, NY. His shop specializes in English car restoration, and it was the first Read More
Making sure your car is Q-tip-perfectly prepared before the concours judges arrive is stressful enough, but do we now have to watch for debris falling out of the sky? We’re talking about what the FAA calls Unmanned Aircraft Systems, but the rest of us call them drones.
Drones are pretty fantastic devices that hover and fly around in the sky with a camera and capture amazing photographic images and videos. Plus, they are a lot cheaper than helicopters. The high-quality, Read More
Disputes involving car restoration work are definitely in the upper echelon of the “Legal Files” Top 10 Hit Parade. That shouldn’t be surprising. Restorations have many elements that can easily lead to disputes:
1. It is really hard to know up front what level of work and cost most restorations are going to involve. For example, how deep the “surface rust” really goes can’t be discovered until you take things apart. No one has a crystal ball.
2. Given the Read More
January is nearing, and a good percentage of us will be making the annual pilgrimage to Scottsdale auction week. Great cars in the winter desert is tough to beat, especially when you board your plane in single-digit weather. But with thousands of bidders chasing fewer cars, well-stocked bidders’ bars and many millions of dollars changing hands — total sales reached $291 million in 2015 — there are plenty of things that can go wrong and create a Legal File.
It’s the end of a great year for the collector car market. As it winds down, readers should take the opportunity to focus on a number of planning details.
Year-end tax planning doesn’t look terribly complicated this year. Election season is in full swing — even though the election is many months away — and neither party seems very interested in starting a battle over tax rates. Consequently, it seems safe to predict Read More
As exchange rates fluctuate, collector cars cross the oceans in the direction of the arbitrage. Add in some recent changes in U.S. import rules, and there is now quite a bit of interest in importing collector cars into the U.S. Is that a feasible option for the collector?
U.S. law imposes a number of regulatory requirements on cars — safety, bumper, theft-prevention, emissions and other standards — which have often been very different than the requirements in other countries. The Read More
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