My turn to ask for insurance advice - To claim or not to claim

I'd research the comp values and talk to your agent to see where the threshold is for surcharges and how long they stick around. Your paying for insurance, see if you can make it work for you, rather than saving them money.  

Lets say the value is $6k, minus the $1k deductible and you end up with $5k to split between a replacement vehicle and any surcharge. 

Even if they raise the rates by $1k per year for 3 years, you're still ahead with your $2k back in your pocket. Depending on the salvage value, you may be able to keep it and fix it and still come out even. 

Check into the states laws for title and inspection if you go this route. In Mass if it's a certain age the state doesn't care. My son had an accident with the 98 Ram and it was totaled (all sheet metal, radiator and ac condenser) but still has a clean title. In the end the insurance went up about $500/year and I came out ahead if I ignore the labor cost to put it back together. 

In reply to No Time :

That scenario seems to rely on the idea that insurance rates could decrease over time, something I've never personally witnessed. Hell the insurance on my Toyobaru went up by 30% over 2 years for something between "1 speeding ticket" and "insurance exec felt entitled to more of my money."

If the rates just stay high forever including on later vehicles, then you're back to making infinite payments to cover a finite repair cost.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

I don't think it relies on insurance rates decreasing over time, but on the surcharges going away after a fixed period of time. The rates are going to increase annually whether or not you make a claim, but surcharges should have a finite duration. 

Slightly off topic but why should rates always go up? I bought a new car. It has depreciated in the past 3 years. It will cost less now to replace with a similar used car value. It is still in production so parts are available. I have 3 years experience driving that car, so I am better now at driving it defensively. I am 3 years older and wiser. Nothing else is changed. Yet my rates are 15% higher now than when I bought it. What gives? Inflation? Everyone else around us getting stupider?

In reply to maschinenbau :

Because publicly traded companies' profits must always go up and to the right

Because the value of the cars around your car is increasing. 

maschinenbau said:

Slightly off topic but why should rates always go up? I bought a new car. It has depreciated in the past 3 years. It will cost less now to replace with a similar used car value. It is still in production so parts are available. I have 3 years experience driving that car, so I am better now at driving it defensively. I am 3 years older and wiser. Nothing else is changed. Yet my rates are 15% higher now than when I bought it. What gives? Inflation? Everyone else around us getting stupider?

There are a lot of factors at work there, and increasing profits is actually pretty far down the list.  Remember, the concept of insurance is a large group of people pooling their money together to cover risk. Therefore, your car may be depreciating but someone else is buying a brand new car with very expensive parts. Even bigger than that is liability. Between runaway juries, plaintiff lawyers, and dramatically rising medical costs liability coverage is extremely expensive. Those costs have to be spread around to the entire pool.

Again, thanks for all the input!

It sounds like getting the valuation is going to be difficult.  An FMB search shows nothing near me, and if I do push the distance out a bit, I've got one in PA for $1,200 from 19 weeks ago and another in NC for $12k.  Autotrader has exactly 0 results on a nationwide search.  It's kind of weird to have a car that somewhat literally cannot be replaced.  I can ask my agent on Monday about the ramifications of withdrawing a claim and what he thinks the claim would do to my rates for how long, but my experience is that he's pretty good at plugging numbers into the Wonkulator to get a quote, but not so great about knowing things.  But I can give him a try and see what he has to say.  If I were fairly confident that they'd value it at $6k, cut a check for $5k, take the car, and then raise my rates by $500/yr for 5 years, that seems like a good deal unless I'm completely missing something.

I am going to go over first thing on Monday and load the car on the trailer and get it back into my possession.  It'll pretty much have to just sit until I get back.  Unless the conversation I have with my agent is vastly different than the giant shrug that I expect, I'll get it up on the lift and evaluate how bent up things are behind there.

So glad the kids are OK, sucks about the car.

Look at your Safeco policy for "accident forgiveness". 6 years since I sold insurance but I 'think' Safeco had an commonly-added  package which included that endorsement. A $0 claim still indicates an incident occurred and many carriers will automatically import that data when rating your policy quote once it comes up on the CLUE (Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange) report. 

https://www.safeco.com/customer-disclaimer

Look to see if your policy is called 'Superior' or 'Ultimate'

First thing that jumped out at me when I looked at the pics was the bumper. Saab bumpers are not light duty. For that to be shifted that far I suspect the left 'frame' rail is bent. If it's folded over itself/accordioned then it needs replaced. Which would junk it even if it was worth real money. Also agree on the core support probably being twisted all to heck.

Weird Saab 900 quirk (if they didn't have enough designed in already):  back in the day, you could order just the front section of the fender. It gets cut over the center of the wheel opening. Wasn't that hard to replace. Being that Saab doesn't really exist anymore, I don't know if that part is still offered. Not that it likely matters here.

In reply to wae :

For comps, you can get an alert from the Saabnet classifieds when a new ad is posted in your category. I still get them whenever a Sonnet II is listed and I haven't been looking for one of those for a long, long time. 

Jesus, man. I'm sorry to see this. Also, I need to stop selling Saabs to other GRMers, apparently. Two of my old cars have been posted here totaled in the past two months.

I think you'd be surprised how much the car is worth on paper. A friend recently received a high 4 figure payout for his '88 Turbo hatchback after being hit by a negligent driver. Thankfully, I have no firsthand experience though.

If you want a (not rusty but otherwise terrible) southern manual turbo convertible to swap your good stuff onto, there's an '87 Turbo in the back 40 here. 

Woody (Forum Supportum) said:

I haven't been looking for one of those for a long, long time. 
 

jfryjfry said:

Because the value of the cars around your car is increasing. 

So it's my neighbors with the Cayenne and the Quattroporte that caused my rates to go up, I'm gonna give them a piece of my mind

SKJSS (formerly Klayfish) said:

z31maniac said:

SKJSS (formerly Klayfish) said:

Check with your agent and have them ask underwriting about rates.  I'm a claims guy so not a foremost expert on rating, however my understanding is that if you report the claim but then withdrawal it there's no impact on rates.  If that's the case, you can start down insurance and see what they offer you. 

It's been a while, but when I worked for State Farm, even a denied claim still stayed on your record as a claim. 

There was no such thing as "withdrawing a claim." Technically you can't get a legally binding answer without filing a claim, although we could tell the agents what was going to be covered before filiing a claim. 

But like Steve said from the start, don't file a claim, just deal with it yourself.

Sure you can withdrawal a claim anytime you want.  Happens routinely.  The claim is still on record but it's considered "closed without payment" or CWP in insurance lingo.  The part I'm not 100% certain on is if it impacts rates.  For the carriers I worked for over the years it didn't to my knowledge.  Often there is some sort of threshold where paying above that amount raises rates.  For example, windshield claims don't raise rates with my carrier.  That's a question for underwriting and the best way to find that out is to go to the agent.  They probably can't say the precise amount of an increase, if any, but can say yes or no.  I am presuming the Saab to be worth decent money.  However if it's truly only worth $2k I would completely agree with just handling it yourself.  Get it out of storage immediately and then part it or whatever. 

Yes you can withdraw, etc, but its still a claim on your record even if there is no pay out. 

At the big companies, agents are little more than sales people, they don't know all the stuff that goes into rates like underwriting. 

In reply to z31maniac :

Totally!  Most agents...not all... are clueless about insurance policies.  But what they can and should do is reach out to the right people at the carrier to get answers.  Basically a middle man. 

Left a message for my agent, haven't gotten a call back yet.  Just talked to the towing outfit and I owe them $300 already for the damned tow.  And I'm assuming that includes two days' worth of $30/day storage fees even though they weren't open on Saturday or Sunday for me to come and get it.

In reply to wae :

Towing companies are brutal! 

I recently had to deal with one and there was an $85 charge just for moving the car out of their impound lot to the parking lot. Probably cost me about $1.50/foot for them to move it for "liability reasons".

In reply to No Time :

Ouch!

In retrospect, I probably should have had them just tow it back to my house and then loaded it up from there, but I'll confess to not focusing on the details at that moment and not really knowing what the costing ramifications were.  Job one was just getting everything and everyone out of the middle of the road and I knew I couldn't drive the car due to the leaking fluids and there is zero shoulder or anything like that in that spot:

The towing is a small cost in comparison to what it would have been if some got hurt while trying to make other arrangements, and probably less than an ER copay. 

If you go the route of filling a claim make sure you talk to the adjuster about the towing costs. 

No Time said:

The towing is a small cost in comparison to what it would have been if some got hurt while trying to make other arrangements, and probably less than an ER copay. 

If you go the route of filling a claim make sure you talk to the adjuster about the towing costs. 

Truth!  I wasn't about to try crawling around that thing or trying to get someone to wait there while I fetched the trailer and tried to line it up.  That's just asking to get killed.

I was in this situation once, where the cops had to get my car towed after it was hit as it was in the middle of the road. I paid an insane amount and then I called AAA and they reimbursed me the money.

If you have AAA, give them a call and see if they will reimburse you.

You should see the bills for heavy duty trucks such as tractor trailers.  I've paid over $40k in towing and storage fees. 

Just had a chat with my agent.  Initially, he thought that given my history of almost no claims, my rates wouldn't get jacked around too much.  His tune changed, though, when I told him that it was my daughter driving not me.  His opinion was that a new driver having a claim like that would be a pretty epic hit to our rates.

Something else he told me was that one of the factors that they'd take into consideration in making adjustments to my rates after a claim was the fact that it happened during inclement weather and was the result of that weather.  I found that somewhat surprising and interesting.