Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Car gets totaled insurance settlement

Yeah - in my area, same price, except they usually have a bit less miles. 24k miles or so and priced 19.9 to 22.9 or so.

fixed it for you

Why would they give him more for the car because he's claiming soft tissue damage now? Wouldn't that be 2 separate things? 1 claim on the car. 1 claim on injuries - not to be connected?

insurance companies are scam artists to put it nicely. they are all about their own profit margins and really couldn't care less about their customers

fixed it for you

Jim1611: Get that "totaled" car replaced with an equal valued car and sell it for what you need.
I hate insurance companies.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Use NADA, Kelly and comps to support your belief that the car is worth more than they are offering.

Ok, this should be easy. Sit down with the adjuster and on your laptop look at other 2021 Fusion's with comparable mileage/condition and hold him to what you find. As said above, make the adjuster say yes to registration $$ for your replacement vehicle. Look at new car dealerships as well as private party.

What is your insurance company? I need to talk to those guys...

I'm not real thrilled with USAA. All of there constant advertisement about being there for veterans and how great they are is a bunch of bullscheiss.... All their advertisement, about being there for military personnel and vets...is a bunch of lies in my book.

Last year they ended up loosing a boat load of money, so their game plan is to jack up insurance rates by 20% this year..... they penalize ALL of their customers for their financial mismanagement. I don't change horses in midstream, and I've been with them for 10+ years. My dad was with them for over 55 years.

What they sell and what they deliver, are two different stories....

they total a car of mine.. did it get hit in an accident? Hell no!

If you've ever heard this one before, ya got one on me...We had a storm blow up overnight at like 3 AM.
In my yard full of Oak Trees, it rained acorns down on top of one of my vehicles. Car was a low mileage vehicle with a manual transmission, and it was towed behind a motor home when the former owners went on vacation. So it looked like hail damage, on top of it. Went out and got a quote of a local guy, who repairs that sort of stuff, with a quote of $900.00.

Instead USAA totals the vehicle, and said they would pay me $7000.00 for the car and tow it away.
If I wanted to keep it, they'd give me like $3800 or so, and put a salvage title on it.

Told them that wasn't acceptable, and I wasn't going to give them the car. So they sent me a check for the $3800 and told me that they had notified the state that they are declaring the car a total, and then tell me I have to surrender the title to the State, and be reissued a Salvage title, at my expense because they won't pay for that... that was like $200.00 more. I had the max insurance that they would sell for each of my vehicles.

Their check set on my desk for 2 years. I sent it back to them when they sent me a letter to cash it or they would cancel it. I sent it back to them. You've got to be standing next to the car to even notice the damage that is exactly like hail damage. Yet now they consider the car having a salvage title, yet they charge full insurance rates, like it was never touched by anything.




an addendum to previous claims I've had to make for totaled vehicles over the decades, and this goes back to the early 80s, and have done it when ever Its been needed. My wife had her VW Camper hit at a stop, by a car going too fast and hit an ice path, and skidded into the front end of the vehicle. It was declared a total even tho I told them they could repair it by putting a new front end on it. They wouldn't do so. They said they were going to send us a check for $3000... my wife had bought the vehicle 3 years earlier for new at $7000. She was going to accept that offer.

Instead I told the insurance people to send the adjuster over and he could write us a check on the spot.
( they'd do that sort of stuff in those days ). He came over and had a check made out for the $3000 and a waiver for any more claims and was expecting to sign over the title to him. I presented him with quotes from all 5 VW dealerships in the Twin Cities, on the cost to replace that vehicle with ones of similar mileage and the same year range....The 10 quotes I got, the average was $7700.00. I gave him a copy of ALL 10 quotes., and handed the $3000 check back to him. Told him that I could pay it off at $7700 to replace it, or we could go in front of the state Insurance Board. He wrote us a check immediately for the $7700, with no questions asked.

I later came across our VW Bus as it still had the same license plate on it. It was repaired and running fine.
A guy bought it from the Bone Yard it had been towed to. He had a new front end put on it, like I had told the insurance company to do, and they refused. He took it to his brother in laws body shop. At the time I was about $1200 to repair it and repaint the front end.

I really think insurance companies, along with the state governments, want to get any vehicle off the road that has had body damage or is what they call 'too old'.. ( read that as having older emission standards on them), so they let insurance companies get away with this offering low prices to keep it, yet they can charge higher insurances rates for the customer if the vehicle is kept, repaired by them and still drive it...

its all a racket, and the states let them get away with it.. Oregon damn sure does....I have ZERO trust in insurance companies. What they sell you and then what you get when they have to deliver, is two entirely different stories.

It was a 'company' car, on our Auto Owners policy.
Her insurer is AIC

I was going to put it on the market at $5k but now I'm rethinking that price.
It didn't sustain a major impact as the person pulled into the side of it from a dead stop as my wife was driving by.
She was maybe going 5MPH, wife aprox 40mph.
Tore up everything from front driver door back, plus A arm, wheel & tire on the rear.

Paint match looks great and it's a one owner 125K miles car.
New tires, battery[went dead in shop over 3 months].

Thinking I'll try for just over $6K and see what happens.

Just remember he will mention that your's is totaled and that is what he bases his reimbursement on (just kidding of course)

BUT

As a lawyer friend one told me . . .


The insurance company is NOT your friend and their goal is to make money!

You need to find a good diminished value arbitrator/vehicle appraiser in your area. For a fixed fee, usually $300.00-600.00 they will represent you and arbitrate with your insurance company. Very rare for a good one not to make you whole, even if it means taking your ins co to small claims court. I've sent a few customers to a local guy here, and they typically settle for thousands more than the initial offer.

Should be easy, but it won't.

Ya don't sit down with an adjuster on this typea deal.

Insco sends an estimator ta check condition and options, and it's entered inta a computer. When ya call, the person you're talkin to won't have any information more than what's entered in the comp.

If ya dick with em, ya get a "supervisor" that'll handjob ya with a couple extra Gs, but that's it.

Major Inscos are offering yard sale valuations, i.e., what they think the car would get if ya sold it outta your driveway.

Dealer comps mean nothing.

If ya pin em down, they'll admit it.

Do you have maintenance records and receipts?

I've fought other folks' insurance companies a couple of times as what they were offering was nowhere near what the car was actually worth. Older vehicle with a replaced engine, new tires, new brakes, new half shafts, etc which just in that were worth more than they offered.

Best wishes in dealing with the hassle. As other's have said, insurance co's are not your friend, yours or the other driver's.

It suuks even more when it was a well maintained and condition vehicle.

Can't find and replace a fuuking unicorn you kept up.

But ya can find chitty chatty bang bang EPA super fund fliud leak POS same year and model.



Hard to replace a well maintained vehicle with something the same condition on what Insurance gives ya per what they think it is worth even after you get them to come up on the amount.


Add in prices now in the new norm bullschitt.


Good luck man..

And all because someone thought his wife was making a right hand turn.

Jeebus.

And Sheesh even.

Insurance companies are in business to collect premiums, not pay out claims.

I dinged up my travel trailer. Ins wanted to total it and give me $4700. I found 3 identical trailers within 50 miles, the cheapest was $11k. They ended up fixing it.
I had a 2005 Toyota Camry. For 3 weeks. I got the title to it the day it was totaled, was not my fault. I managed to get what I gave for it including the registration and new tires I put on it. As a matter of fact, I came out ahead about $300.

Which is what I did this afternoon: I paid up on both trucks. Ugh.

All businesses are in business to make money.

When it comes to insurers, I have my own problems with them, and I work for one. Bad service is completely unacceptable. But rates I don't have an issue with. Rates have to be approved by the states and insurers are required to charge rates that will cover predicted losses. Undercharging customers will get insurers in trouble with the insurance bureaus, too.

Everyone complains about insurance rates. "I haven't had any accidents!" I get it. But facts are facts. The cost of cars, and the cost of parts have skyrocketed. Many car manufacturers are demanding that cars be repaired according to their standards. Cadillac has models that are remove and replace repairs only. In other words, you're required to strip all parts off that are damaged until you get to undamaged parts, then reinstall new OEM parts. No repairing otherwise easily repaired parts. This causes repair costs to, likewise, skyrocket. I won't even bring up Teslas and other EVs. The cost to repair those is even worse. Parts availability is another problem. Parts availability as been so bad that insurers are having to total cars that could be repaired because by the time the owner is out of the rental after waiting for parts and the vehicle being repaired, the threshold would have been well exceeded to total the car. And replacing a totaled car has been problematic due to availability.

And its not just cars. These problems extend to homeowners claims, too. Building supplies have been in very short supply.

Add the fact that banks are offering loan terms of 10 years or more, then we are assured that higher risk drivers are getting into $50,000 and $60,000 vehicles. I've recently paid $78,000 to an E5 for his totaled Tundra. This he paid even $20,000 in premium before he totaled it?

Medical costs are through the roof. So if there is an injury, the cost of paying those claims has gone way up. 10 years ago the average chiropractic bill for a normal course of treatment was around $3,000-$4,000. I regularly see chiro bills now in excess of $12,000 to $15,000.

So you may not have had an accident, and you may be driving a clunker, but if you have a loss, chances are the cost of that loss will be far greater than it has been in the past. It is impossible for an insurer to simply eat risk at no cost. Someone above mentioned that USAA lost a boatload of money due to mismanagement. What happened was is that they did not keep up with the industry in raising rates when they should have, and as much as they should have. Then they had a bad loss year due to catastrophes. And given the high indemnity versus the premium collected, they suffered a loss. Hindsight is 20/20. They should have raised rates sooner like every other insurer.