Not too long ago, I got into a minor accident in a parking lot when the back of my car scraped the back of another vehicle. I talked to the other driver, looked at the small scratches on the back of the car, and decided that it made sense to just write them a check out of my bank account, rather than going through auto insurance.
Normally, making an insurance claim is the right move if there’s a risk of injury or more serious damage. But since the other driver wasn’t even in the car at the time and the incident seemed as if it was very minor, I figured I’d rather avoid having my auto insurance premiums go up due to an accident on my record.
In the end, though, things didn’t turn out as planned and I ended up having to report the crash to my car insurance company. Here’s what happened.
Reporting the accident to my insurance turned out to be necessary for a surprising reason
Since I planned to pay for the repairs for the other driver personally, I asked her to get a quote from a repair shop and send it over to me so I could write a check. But when I received that quote a few days later, I was shocked to see the costs were over $3,500.
Since I thought the incident just involved some minor scratches, this did not seem reasonable to me in any way. The repair quote included removing roof panels and repainting the left side of the car, when the damage was to the bottom right of the vehicle.
I didn’t trust that the repair quote was accurate, I didn’t want to ask the other driver to keep getting quotes from different repair shops, and I wasn’t comfortable writing such a big check to a repair shop I knew nothing about. So I decided it was best to get the insurance company involved.
Insurance protects a policyholder’s interests
Ultimately, I decided that making a claim with my insurance was important because my insurer would protect me.
See, as anyone who has ever done any car repairs knows, it’s not always possible to 100% count on repair shops to be completely transparent about pricing or about what’s actually wrong with a vehicle. I had some serious concerns that the repair company in this case might be inflating the price or trying to do work that wasn’t directly related to the accident since it knew someone besides the car’s owner would be footing the bill.
When going through insurance, though, there’s an investigative process to make sure that the damages the other party claims are accurate. My insurance could — and did — insist on sending out an adjuster to assess the damage. It also had the driver go to one of the insurer’s approved repair shops and it reviewed the quote to make sure it was reasonable.
The fact my insurer protected me against an unfair and inappropriate repair bill reminded me that it really is important to put every claim through insurance when there’s another driver involved — even a claim that seems like it should be a minor annoyance. Insurance doesn’t just pay the bill, but it also protects against scams by looking out for policyholders, since insurers have the knowledge and power to do that.
So, anyone who gets into a fender bender can learn from my mistake — no matter how minor it may seem, reporting it right away to insurance can save a world of headaches. (And potentially a few thousand dollars too!)
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