Jack the car up and take two tires and rims off, that should equal your $300 investment.
My Brother owes me $300 for a car he purchased 2 weeks ago. He keeps giving me the run around? He is suppose to pay me today...If he doesn't what should I do?
If you've already given him the car and the title, you don't have much recourse unless you want to take him to small claims court. This will probably break your relationship with him, but it might have already been rocky if he's dodging you about paying you the money.
In the future, if someone hasn't paid - family or not - don't give them the item until you have received your payment. You'll end up in this same situation again.
Does your brother have the financial means to pay you the $300 or is he hurting for cash? Does he need to the car to get to work so he can support his family?
If you've given him the car and title already, you have two choices. You can keep hounding him for the money - but he already has the car, so what's his incentive to pay you, besides keeping his word?
Or you can decide that it would be easier to gift him the car and accept the fact that he doesn't have the money to pay you. If you take this route, talk to him about this. Tell him that you've decided that this car is your gift to him and he doesn't owe you the money.
If there is nothing in writing - the fact that he owes you money - you can try and take the car back from him, but if he calls the cops and he has the title, you might lose that battle.
Judge judy time
Rule #1. Never lend money to family, unless you are willing to just give it away. People who borrow from family, and close friends, usually do so because they have not been responsible with money to begin with. The only time I lent money to my brother I got a series of post dated checks to pay off the loan.
So your question is basically I think---how do I make lemonade out of lemons?
I am an only child, so I have no experience with this kind of think, although I have run into this with my wife.
A suggestion was made to decide ahead of time how we were going to look at such loans in the future from out point of view. We decided how much "charity" we could afford over a certain period of time for her and that was her cutoff point. She may have considered it a loan, but we looked at is a gift---so when she didn't repay us, it would only be an issue for her, not us. That worked well.
My concern is that to turn this into a gift for him after the fact would be like a splinter in your finger when you deal with him in the future.
Plus, your brother might be thinking that the $300.00 dollars would serve to address some real or imagined wrong that he thinks you perpetrated against him sometime in the past when you were growing up.
If that's the case there is an unknown factor that you really can't effectively deal with.
Sometimes the small claims court can clear the air and help such people as your brother to reassess their priorities. The small claims court is a party with no "skin in the game." And once he is served to appear, that might be all the impetus he needs to stop with the excuses.
(I did have a brother in law that I dealt with in a similar situation. I took him to small claims court and after being served by the clerk of the court, he came over that night to tell me his plan to repay me. He keep to the plan, and we never had to go to court.)
