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When we first arrived in NL, we lived in an area in Amsterdam that was a 1 minute walk away from the Tram stop that went straight to Amsterdam Centraal. The shopping centre on the one side was about 700m away from us and a bigger shopping centre on the other side was about 3km away from us. This made it very easy to live without the need for a car. Everything we needed was pretty much 0 - 3km's away which was very convenient.
When we decided to buy a house and we started looking at the different areas and where we could afford, we settled on Lelystad. When we started viewing actual properties, it would take us anything from 1.5hr to 2hrs to get to the appointments so we decided it was time to buy a car.
The licensing of a car works differently in NL, where you have monthly road tax that you have to pay and your car has to be roadworthy. You have to do a roadworthy inspection according to a schedule, its referred to as the APK here. If your car is brand new, the APK only has to be done after 4 years, thereafter the next APK must be done 2 years later and thereafter every year. This is to ensure that the cars on the road are roadworthy and safe to drive. You will be able to see when your car has to have the APK inspection by looking up the license plate. That is another thing that is different here in NL, a car gets a license plate for life, it does not change when the car is sold. This way you can use the license plate number to look up the history of the car and see when the APK is due. I will cover more of this in the next topic.
You will need a dutch drivers license in order to buy a car so you need to make sure you get that before you start this process.
One other thing to note, we decided to buy a car cash as buying a car on finance does affect how much mortgage you will qualify for, so we decided to go this route and buy a car cash so that we still had our full mortgage budget available. If I recall, a car that would've cost €20 000 would take off about €70 000 from the amount we would've qualified for with no vehicle finance. This is something you should take into consideration if you are planning on buying a house as well.
Once you are ready to buy a car, you need to find one, we used the AutoScout24 app to look for cars, we did not want to have to do the registration process ourselves so we decided to only look at cars that were being offered by a dealer.
We knew what car we wanted so we based our search on those filters and found one that was in our cash budget.
When you are looking at the cars, you should look up the license plate number on Finnik to check the history of the car. You put the license plate number in and you can see the stats of the car, how much road tax is and what the service history is. In this free report you can see if the car had all its services and APK's and whether it was recalled or had issues during the APK inspection. You can pay for a more detailed report as well but we didn't find it necessary. We decided to only go for cars that were originally registered in NL and not an import. The site will tell you when the car was imported into NL.
It will also tell you when the next APK is due so that you can see potentially how close that is and whether there could be any issues (i.e. if the last APK was done 4 years ago). If you are buying from a dealer, most of the time they will do the APK for you if it is coming up or perhaps in the past.
It is important to understand the road tax that you will be paying as some cars were really high, some dealerships add in to the ad how much road tax is but others don't. We did find that some dealerships put minimal information on AutoScout24 so we would go to the specific dealerships website to see more photos or additional information. Hand in hand with Finnik I thought it was a relatively smooth process.
There are other sites that you can purchase from such as Bynco or AutoHero, here you have to order the car online and they will deliver the car to you which you have to test drive for 2 weeks. You can then decide if you want to keep it or not. We have heard of 2 people (via friends) who had bad experiences, the first one had the car for a day and returned it and they charged him over €1000 for damages which were already on the car when they received it. The other friend had so many issues with the car and they finally found out that the car they bought was 2 cars that were in accidents that they built into 1 car. I'm sure there are people who have had good experiences as well but we decided to go old school.
In my opinion, it is best to go to a dealership where you can actually view the car in person and do a test drive instead.
For the first car we contacted the dealership and made an appointment to view the car. When we arrived, they had the car ready and we did a walk through as well as did a test drive around the area. It was the first time driving in NL so it was quite nerve wracking for me. Ultimately we liked the car and decided to buy it.
We did decide after 5 months to buy a different car and so we went through the process again, found a car on AutoScout24 that we wanted, made an appointment to view the car, we were not allowed to test drive it when we viewed it at this dealer but we were allowed to take the Vin number and get a report on it. Due to it being an import, there was no license plate number to look up. I did pay for a report (I think it was €20) which never arrived.
We decided to move forward with buying the car and we called the dealership back and they asked us to contact their finance broker so that they could verify we would qualify for finance (we did not have enough cash for this one). They would keep the car reserved for us for 3 days while the finance was being checked. We would be trading our current car in so we only needed half the finance. Refer to the topic below for more details.
Once it was confirmed that we qualify for the finance, we were allowed to test drive the car so we made an appointment and took it for a test drive. The controls on the steering wheel were damaged so we asked him to fix it as part of the deal which he agreed to. When we were there for a test drive, he also checked our car in terms of the trade in value and we agreed on the trade in amount which we both though was far to both parties.
Due to the second car being more expensive, we did not have enough cash to pay for it and had to apply for finance. We used the finance broker from the dealership as it was easier. The company charged us €300 for the service (which they only told us about afterwards) and they would apply at the relevant financial institutions on behalf of us and the dealership. It was also easier because the dealership sent all the documents (invoice etc) straight to the finance broker.
Due to being married, we had to send both our documents even though I was the only one applying for the actual finance.
Passports and residence permits
Drivers licenses
Latest payslips
Latest full month bank statements showing our income and expenses
Employment contracts
The banks want at least 3 years of history before they will give you a loan so they applied with a company called Dutch Finance. Originally we wanted to take the loan over 2 years but the broker said that they offered a 60 month loan instead so it was take it or leave it. We decided to proceed with the offer Dutch Finance made and signed the contract.
We had to take out the credit insurance as per the contract with their chosen provider. We received the policy documents 1 day after we sent the signed finance contract in.
We used FinanceBizniz: https://financebizniz.nl/ for the finance broker and Dutch Finance: https://www.dutchfinance.nl for the actual loan.
The interest rate that banks offer are much better than what you will get from the other institutions, unfortunately because we did not have 3 years worth of history at a bank, we were limited with which companies we could apply with. We got a interest rate of 7.49% over 60 months.
Before you are allowed to collect the car, you will have to get a insurance for it and a confirmation letter that you can show to the dealership to prove the insurance is active. All you need to give to your insurance company is the license plate number and the date you want the cover to start. (We pay €95 for a golf but we didn't have a claim free years letter from our previous insurance company in South Africa so I think our rate is a bit higher as we have 0 claim years on our record here).
Because we were paying cash for the first car, we did the eft transfer immediately and then were told that the car would be ready in 2 weeks time which was a little let down but at the end of the day they got the car ready in a week and we could go and pick it up. We had to have a letter of insurance coverage before we were allowed to fetch the car.
When we fetched the car, we were given the green credit card which are the registration papers. You have to keep this on you when you are driving. We also got the registration code (4 digit code) a few days later. You will need both when you eventually sell the car.
For the second car we bought, ss soon as the finance was confirmed and the contract signed, we could fetch the car, once again, they needed 2 weeks to fix the controls on the steering wheel and get everything ready for us. When we arrived, we had to bring the green credit card and 4 digit code for our current car that we were trading in as well as my drivers license.
The dealer immediately transferred both cars online and we could drive away in our new car. A few days later we received the green credit card as well as the 4 digit code. We also got the confirmation of the sale (vrijwaringsbewijs) of our current car which we had to give to the insurance company to cancel the existing insurance.
If you decide to buy from a private person, you can read about how to register a car in your name here.
4 April - viewed the car
5 April - sent all the documents through to the finance broker
7 April - Test drove the car
8 April - received the offer & contract from Dutch Finance, signed it and sent it back the same day
8 April - contacted my insurance broker and added the car to the insurance policy
9 April - received credit insurance policy documents
11 April - received the confirmation letter from insurance, confirming the car was insured
13 April - collected the car from the dealership