After a car wreck: when to deal with the other person’s insurance?

Today I wanna answer a question about repairing a car: "After I've been in a car wreck, can I repair my car before dealing with the other person's insurance?" And the answer is yes you certainly can. In fact, a lot of times, it'll be the most convenient for you to repair your car, and it'll show exactly what needs to happen to your car, what you need to be paid in order to make you whole.

When my clients have been in a car wreck and they need to get their car repaired, they have a couple options. One, is to have their own auto insurance pay for the repairs and then get that money from the other person's insurance company. Now, usually they'll pay for everything, except for maybe like $500 deductible or something like that. And once the other person's insurance accepts fault for the wreck, then they'll get that $500 and they'll pay it back to you. I usually recommend that people do this because it's easiest to deal with your own insurance company, because they wanna keep you as a customer. And so they will provide you with the best service and the quickest service. One problem with running it through the other driver's auto insurance, is they don't really care about you, you're not their customer. And sometimes they have these delay tactics like they'll say, "Well, we can't authorize "the repairs to the car, "because we don't know whose fault it is yet, "because we haven't talked to our insured." And they can drag this out for weeks whereas if you had your own car insurance pay for it, you'd already be repaired and back on the road. But if you don't have comprehensive coverage, then you can have the other person's insurance pay for your repairs, and once they determine that their insured is at fault, then they will either send an adjuster out to examine your car and determine how much money it'll take to repair it or they'll tell you to go to one of the body shops in your area that they have a contract with, and they'll just pay for whatever that body shop charges.

Now, sometimes people don't wanna wait for either one and they just wanna get their car repaired and they say, "Hey look, "I'm gonna get my car repaired, I'll pay in cash "and then someone will reimburse me later." You can certainly do it. If I were doing that, I would probably take my car to at least two body shops so that I could get competing quotes, and so I could show that I picked a reasonable quote, right? Maybe you take it to three all in one area, and you pick the middle most quote, or you just take it to a body shop that's pretty well respected and you know provides good service. And most importantly, will provide good records of exactly what they did to repair, and why they needed to repair it.

I would also ask them to take pictures if they could, to show exactly what parts were being replaced. Now let's say that you wanna repair the car but the other side's really dragging their feet and you don't have the cash to fix it. Another thing you can do, is you can have your car appraised and you can have someone come out and look at it and come up with what it would cost to repair it, or what the total loss value would be if it's just not worth it repairing it. and you have to pay this person some money to come out and do it. But they will provide this kind of neutral cost estimate for what it'll take to repair your car. And then you can send that, to the other person's insurance company and say, "Hey here's what it's gonna cost, cut me a check." And in fact, if you send it to them in a demand, if you send it to them by certified mail return receipt and you give them 60 days to pay up. If they don't do that, then you can sue them and they have to pay for attorney's fees if you win. And that's also commonly something that we'll do to kind of provide some leverage if they're trying to be funny with the property claim. T

Those are some options for what to do with the car and how to get it fixed. My number one suggestion, run it through your own insurance, that's probably gonna be the easiest way to get it done.