Wow, and insurance company was actually helpful! :D

[x88x]

About a week and a half ago now, I was on my way to class when I got rear-ended by a big truck. Completely missed my bumper (stupid non-standard bumper heights), bent my trunk lid a bit and knocked two holes in my drivers-side taillights...mostly because the 'bumper' was stainless steel (stupid non-standard bumper materials :P ). Fortunately, I was stopped and the truck was moving very slowly, so no more damage besides that, and since I was completely stopped, everyone involved agreed that I wasn't liable.

After a few days waiting nervously for our insurance companies to mesh, they sent over an appraiser, who estimated that the cost of parts/repairs/etc would be a total of $1452.79. This actually was very convenient, since according to the Kelley Blue Book, my car is only worth $1460. So just barely not totaled :banana:

Now comes the really cool part. The other guy's insurance company just cut me a check for the appraiser's estimate, and are letting me deal with it past that. I suppose this would be annoying if I took it somewhere and they charged more than the appraisal, but since I hadn't yet, when I found out they were just gonna cut me a check, I did some searching... Turns out I can get the parts for about $300-400, and I know I can do the work myself, and it shouldn't take more than a couple hours.

So, what started out as 'I really don't want to have to deal with this right now' ended up as 'Holy crap! I have, like, $1100 that I wasn't expecting to have! Sweet!!'.

:banana::banana::banana::banana:

Hurray for the world actually working out well sometimes :D

[Kayin]

Awesome!

Now go invest that. $1100 is a nice amount to have hiding in an emergency.

[Liquid_Scope_99]

Glad to hear it went so well man do i see upgrades in your future

[Trace]

Dude thats great!
Normally insurance companies do nothing to help you.

[x88x]

Glad to hear it went so well man do i see upgrades in your future

Heheh, no, probably not. It'll be going to (in order of priority) Christmas presents, savings, Nokia N900. It was interesting timing too, since last week before payday my bank account dropped down to ~$12...the lowest it's been in a loong, loong time. I wasn't exactly prepared for a series of large expenses over the last couple months...not helped by the fact that I blew ~$300 on parts for my server back in September... :whistler: (..dang, has it been sitting waiting that long? ..wow, I need to do something about that). Anyways, I managed to eek out the last week till payday by pulling from what little I had in savings, so that's where most of this is gonna end up.

[slaveofconvention]

Consider yourself lucky you are not in the UK. The process here is a little different. There is a booming market in buying crash damaged vehicles for repair and sale so as a result, they might well have said "The truck is worth $1500 total, and $600 in it's current state - the most we'll pay for repairs is $900" on the grounds that they could take it off you, pay you the $1500 and then sell it for the $600 so they're only $900 out of pocket. I saw a perfectly good (older) Jaguar written off a few years back for two dented bumpers. The car was only insured for the purchase price of £2000 and the bumpers, which were chromed steel and therefore virtually impossible to repair to "new" condition, were £900 each, so the insurance company just wrote off the car for two small dents on the grounds that the car was worth way more than £200 in its damaged state....

[x88x]

O_o that's...more than a little ridiculous...wow. Yeah...if they'd said that, I would have just said, "Screw you, give me the $900 and I'll fix it myself!"

Many years ago, my parents had something like that happen, where the insurance company said the car was totaled (granted, it had a crapload of cosmetic damage, and it wasn't running after the accident...), and they would either give them something around $1000 for the car, or something around $300-400 and they could keep it...well, at the time, they were pretty poor (just out of college, lots of student loans, and they're both teachers), so they took the lesser amount. Then my dad ended up fixing it by replacing a $0.35 piece of fuel line :P (still lots of cosmetic damage, but it worked fine, was decently safe, and was still legal)

[slaveofconvention]

It makes sense, from the insurers point of view. At the end of the day, they're a business there to make a profit, which means 1. getting in as much money as possible and 2. paying out as little as possible - given a choice between a $900 payout and a $1500 payout, you have to admit it makes economic sense for them to go with the $900

[DaveW]

Insurance companies in the UK laugh all the way to the bank every day. It's a legal requirement to have insurance here (as in many US states) but they just take us for a ride here, pumping up the prices as far as they can. For example, my current car cost me £400. Searching for insurance, the most expensive quote I got was for around £4000 per year, and over half of the companies knocked me back (simply on the grounds that I'm under 25). However, Tesco came to my rescue and I'm paying them about £450 a year for third party insurance. Out of about 30 quotes, only 3 of those were under £1000, and Tesco was a clear winner. Unless you're a 35 year old woman with 5 years no-claims driving a Daewoo Matiz, you WILL be screwed over by UK insurance companies.

-Dave

[slaveofconvention]

I'm paying over £500 a year fully comp for my 2002 Peugeot 306 diesel - and I'm 36 lol - course, if I'd taken my test when I was 17 like I should have done, instead of driving for 16 years without a licence, it'd be a different story - now I'm stuck with an official 3 years driving experience and zero no-claims till next year as I was a second driver until this year to keep the costs down