If you have been in a car accident and your totaled car is a total loss, there are a number of things that you need to keep in mind regarding the car’s insurance and the insurer’s offer, to help you get the best deal out of the situation. If you are not prudent enough, you might end up agreeing to a sub-standard deal and lose out on money and insurance that you otherwise deserved. Complemented with the stress and tension that an accident comes associated with, this hassle can prove to be too much of a tension to bear. Therefore, you need to be well versed with the intricacies of your insurance policy or the various tactics that insurance companies are known to play with you when your totaled card comes out as a total loss.
An overview of totaled car or total loss insurance
After a vehicle has been in an accident, with severe damages done to it, an adjuster from the insurance company is allocated to investigate the crash, its reasons and assess the damages that the car has suffered. This allows the adjuster to make a fair and educated judgment regarding the reimbursements that you should be offered for the loss and damage that you and your totaled car have suffered.
In the case that the adjuster finds out that the costs required for the repairing of the vehicle, or the costs associated with the loss of value is more than the insured value, the vehicle may be deemed by the insurance company to be a totaled vehicle or a ‘total loss’. If the totaled car is in such a devastated condition that repairing it safely is an illusory dream, the car would still be regarded as a total loss.
What follows after this is a lot dependent on the insurance policies that you have individually agreed to for your car and the different insurance companies that might be handling your case. However, the general rule is that insurance policy holders get offered a justified market value that the car has as on the date the accident occurred.
Cheap tricks that insurance companies are known to play
Once your totaled car has been written off as a totaled car or a total loss, an insurance company strives to pay you as little as possible and it can be said that this is invariably a job that they are known to do. However, you must always remember that you are liable to be paid the fair market value of the car, before you had gotten into an accident. In the case that it seems that the insurance company has quoted you with a low price of reimbursement for your totaled car, take the time and effort to conduct a research from your own end and find out the actual value that the car would have had in the market as of the date of the accident, and whether it coincides with the value that the insurance company claims it would have sold it for. Also remember that in the case you had made any modifications or improvements in the car, its price is supposed to be higher. The work of the appraiser simply includes valuing your car based on the mileage it has, the region you are located in, its condition level, and associated options that come with it. However, you must be aware of the fact that the value of your car increases and is definitely more than what the insurance company claims, if you have a rare color, trip level or special edition vehicle registered to your name.
How do you protect yourself from such situations?
A large number of complaints, allegations and even lawsuits have been filed against insurance companies, with big names like GEICO being accused of insurance fraud, whereby the complainants have claimed that the insurance company has not paid them the adequate and just market values for their cars, deducted on sales tax and associated fees, or simply provided them with an offer that is substandard. Therefore, you need to remember that you are not obligated by law to accept the offer that the insurance company provides to you, as it might be several hundred or even thousands of dollars less than what you actually deserve. It is most prudent to take the help of appraisal tools and conduct rigorous research to find out the price that you actually deserve. The help of a totaled car loss lawyer who is well versed in the intricacies of the field, can tackle problematic insurance companies with ease and help you get your deserved insurance money is also a wise and brilliant decision. If you are looking for the best totaled car loss attorney in the industry, make sure that you approach Shamis & Gentile P.A, a class action law firm that is exemplary at the services it provides regarding cases of total loss vehicles. In order to avail more information be sure to contact Shamis & Gentile PA at the earliest and book a session to get your situation assessed and take the necessary legal steps if you are eligible to sue your insurance company for a total loss car accident class action lawsuit investigation.
