[VIDEO] How to Pre-pay Virginia Tickets
Find out how and when to pre-pay your ticket. Keep in mind, when you pre-pay you are saying “I’m guilty”. Contact me today to see what other options you might have.
Video Transcription
Hello, my name is Andrew Flusche. I’m your Virginia traffic and misdemeanor lawyer. If you have a traffic ticket for something other than a misdemeanor, for like a simple speeding ticket for example, the box on your ticket may be checked that says you can avoid coming to court if you complete all the instructions on ticket. What that means is you have a pre-payable citation and that’s a choice you can make if you want to pre pay that ticket. Keep in mind though, that pre paying is pleading guilty, so essentially, you’re paying the fine, you’re pleading guilty to the offense as charged and once everything is processed, that offense will land on your driving record depending on where your license is from, of course.
But if you have a Virginia license, a Virginia ticket will certainly end up on your driving record. How do you prepay? Let’s say you want to prepay and you know that you want too, how do you do that? There’s basically a couple different ways, you could go to the Clerk’s office for the court where the ticket is pending and you could take care of the payment in person but definitely, most clerk’s offices stop taking payments by three or three thirty on the day before court. You can’t prepay usually the morning of court, you need to go earlier on the day before court.
The second option would be to prepay online. Virginia Court System has a simple website where you can look up your ticket and you can process the payment on line and again, the payment’s cut off in the afternoon on the day before court, so you definitely should prepay a couple days early. The key thing about prepaying is if you just want to pay a ticket, keep in mind that if you don’t prepay and you don’t show up to court and they send you a bill afterwards, then they will add on a fee for being tried in your absence. If you just want to be found guilty and you want to pay the fine, there’s an incentive to pay it early, it saves you some of the court costs.
Before you prepay, remember that it’s pleading guilty, remember that it will go on your record and that’s a reason that you should talk to me about your case to see what I can do to help you, if we might can have it dismissed and it might not cost you anymore depending on the circumstances and what the fine is, it may be a case that we could resolve to your satisfaction and actually save you some money and make it where you might not even have to pay a dime to the court. If you want to prepay, now you know how but I would encourage you first to talk to me or to see what your options might be.
