[jlgaddis]

You don't lose or "waste" the registrations/renewals you've already paid for when you transfer a domain to a new registrar.

Most registrars will include a year as part of the transfer so if you have a domain at GoDaddy that expires in 2024, you can transfer it to Namecheap and then it'll expire in 2025 -- without "wasting" what you've already paid for.

[tyingq]

You're right. I think my memory was domains where you wanted to prepay for "privacy", so the ownership didnt show during the xfer after the auction.

[cirno]

GoDaddy forces you to disable privacy protection to transfer domains off of them. One more truly villainous practice designed to force people to stay. Eventually I became so dissatisfied with GoDaddy that I took the risk and transferred my really old domains off of them anyway. I got lucky and scum websites like domainstools didn't manage to archive my name and address to sell to online stalkers in time, but it's a risk you'd have to take.