If you had an accident, and you’re at fault in that accident, and you need to get your vehicle repaired, this video here will give you some information and some basic tips on how to do that.
So you had an “at fault” auto accident, and now you need to get the collision damage repaired. There are a few things you want to do. First of all, contact your carrier right away. They’re going to need to talk to you. They want to get a statement from you, what happened in the accident and find out all the details. If there’s another vehicle at fault, they’ll need that party’s information as well.
The next thing to do is to assess the damage. How much damage did the car get? Either the insurance adjuster from your insurance company can come out and take a look at the vehicle and let you know how much damage it is, or you can go and get an estimate. Sometimes there’s an in between area that you can kind of do where the insurance company has a preferred shop and that preferred shop can actually do the estimate for you and they can repair the vehicle right there for you, as well. So check with your carrier and find out if you need to talk to an adjuster or if you need to get an estimate from an auto body shop or if there’s a preferred shop you can work with through your insurance carrier.
And remember that if you have rental reimbursement on your vehicle policy that you can get a rental vehicle and the insurance company will pay for that. If you opted to purchase that coverage ahead of time, that’s what it does cover, rental reimbursement. If you do not have that coverage, you can arrange with an auto body shop to get a rental vehicle. Some of them provide free cars, some of them you have to pay an additional fee for.
So you want to make sure that you contact your carrier, get some estimates, and then get the vehicle repaired. If you have a deductible on your policy, typically a five hundred dollar or a thousand dollar deductible is very typical on a collision coverage, talk to you carrier and make sure you found out what deductible that is. You’ll be responsible for paying that deductible portion when you pick up your vehicle.
An instance would be: let’s say you have three thousand dollars worth of damage and you have a five hundred dollar deductible. The insurance company would write a check for twenty five hundred dollars. It would be three thousand, and they would deduct the five hundred dollars off of there. Your portion would be the five hundred dollars when you go to pick up the vehicle. So talk to the insurance carrier about that, make sure you know what your deductible is so that you can plan for that when you do pick up your vehicle.
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