Update: they just sent us what they want to pay. We paid $18,633 for the car. This was negotiated down from something like $19,895. They’re claiming the market value for the car is $18,169 – about $500 less than what we paid. Between that, and their refusal to pay the $700 document fee we paid, we’ll be out about $1,200 because their client hit our car. We can afford $1200, but it’s definitely not chump change for us, and will mean we settle for a less-good car.
Are we just SOL, or is there any reasonable grounds on which we can contest their valuation and/or refusal to pay the signing fee (since the signing fee was less than 24 hours old)?
Hopefully my last update:
I wrote them a polite email suggesting that they ought to pay us the full $20,000 that we’d spent for the car. I expected them to lapse into sorry-not-sorry legalese where they’d explain why they were gonna screw me.
What I wasn’t expecting was a call from them thanking me for my patience, AND AGREEING TO PAY THE FULL AMOUNT.
Liberty Mutual earns my full praise (assuming that the check comes through as they’ve promised).
Good for them! Good for you!
Glad it worked out.
Sweet! That’s what I would have done but I didn’t dare ask you to hope for it.
That’s awesome.
A bit behind the times, but yay!!
Typo Knig was in a 4-car pileup back in 1998. He was not at fault. He was hit from behind and pushed into the car in front of him.
His 8-year-old Civic was declared totalled - luckily; we could see that there was frame damage (the roof of the car had a visible crimp in it). In fact, 3 of the 4 cars involved were declared totalled - it was a nasty pileup (no injuries - WEAR YOUR SEAT BELTS!!!).
We dealt with the at-fault insurance company, though as I recall we did report it to our own as well. We asked for something like 1200 dollars in compensation to cover possessions we could not get out of the car, as well as lost time from work in dealing with the situation.
The insurer said “how about 2,000 and you go away forever”. As we knew by then he had no injuries, we took it - this was in addition to the payout for the totalled car.
To the best of my knowledge, this meant we waived the right to sue them. It did NOT waive our health insurer’s right to attempt to recoup expenses - which were nonzero: Typo Knig developed visual disturbances a few days later. I made him call his doctor, who had him go to the ER to get a CT scan. This, luckily, turned up nothing; he was “just” developing a migraine. I have no clue whether the health insurance tried to recoup the costs - probably not. Had it been a more obvious injury type of situation (e.g. broken bone) we’d have gotten a questionnaire essentially saying “pretty please can we sue someone on your behalf?”.