Quote: (07-12-2016 12:58 AM)AneroidOcean Wrote:
I'd love for this to break down specific types of insurance, but there's a lot of great information in this thread. If there's one thing that you have to absolutely BROW BEAT yourself with when dealing with insurance companies, it's this:
Some of the different kinds of auto insurance are liability insurance, which you are often, or always, required by law to carry if you drive a motor vehicle, collision insurance, personal injury protection (P.I.P.) insurance, and uninsured motorist coverage.
If you are involved in an accident and the driver of the other vehicle was covered by liability insurance at the time of the accident, then his liability insurance should pay for damage to your vehicle, your medical expenses, future medical expenses, time lost from work, and pain and suffering.
P.I.P. may be optional, but I strongly recommend that anyone driving a car obtain P.I.P. What the P.I.P. policy does is it pays for your medical expenses and your lost wages up to a certain amount per person for everyone in your car at the time of the accident. Because of something called the independent source doctrine, the other vehicle's liability insurance carrier, is required to compensate you in full regardless of what your own P.I.P. carrier pays, does not pay, or whether or not you have P.I.P.
Insured motorist coverage is as the name suggests, insurance which you can, and may be required to, obtain to cover you against vehicles which do not have insurance coverage. In can cover you in the event of a hit and run accident where you do not have the tag number or the insurance information of the car which hit you.
Collision insurance covers property damage to your vehicle regardless of whether or not you were in fault at causing the damage. If you have an expensive car and a tree falls on it, you want collision coverage as you could be seriously affected if you had to pay out of pocket for the repairs. Unless you drive a real junker, I say get collision coverage.
I have found that often the (liability) insurance companies which pay the best are out of state commercial insurers which write very few policies in your state. A lot of the reason for this is that those companies may very well not have in-house counsel in your state and may not even have attorneys who they regularly use to represent them in your state. They often just figure that it makes more economic sense to just offer your client more money than go through the process of defending a case in a state in which they are rarely involved. Local insurers, such as State Farm and Allstate, have such a strong presence in many states that they may have countless in-house and outside lawyers, countless cases pending in the court system in your state, and it makes a lot of sense for them to lowball you.