I was driving with the kids in the back when someone rear-ended me, just a small fender bender. In the moment I was so startled I almost yelled, but when I looked, it was minor: the license plate screws had just been pushed slightly into my bumper.
I did think about climbing out holding the back of my neck (kidding), but anyway, when I got out, the other driver was a young woman in nurse’s scrubs. I said “What’s going on?” acting a little angry to get the upper hand, but she apologized, said she’d been looking at her GPS, and asked if the kids were okay. She didn’t seem like a bad person, so I was relieved. Then she asked if we could settle it with cash. The reason was that it was her new job’s car, and it seemed she didn’t want her employer to find out (for the record, her car was totally fine). I told her I’d think about it, grabbed the info I figured I’d need, and left.
- The other driver’s license
- The other driver’s insurance card
- The damage on the other driver’s car
She didn’t have the company car’s insurance card on her, so she gave me her personal auto insurance card, which happened to be with the same company as mine (State Farm). Later I asked my insurance agent, and he advised that to do it properly, I should go through insurance. Since it was the same company, he said it would be really easy, and that there were two ways to handle it.
- File a claim with my own insurance. Not recommended, since that makes sense when the damage is over $1,000, and my minor accident didn’t qualify.
- File a claim with the other driver’s insurance. Since it was the same company as mine, I expected it to go smoothly.
B.U.T. There was one thing I missed: what I needed was the insurance for the car she was actually driving at the time (not her personal policy..). Things got messy fast. I texted her that I needed her company’s insurance info. At first she replied nicely, but her company didn’t hand over the info right away, I kept asking, and I guess she started getting fed up. As the one who got hit, I wasn’t going to pay out of my own pocket, and I had no idea getting the other driver’s company car info would be this hard. I did regret not just taking a few hundred bucks in cash on the spot. And now she was the one telling me cash was off the table… In the end I managed to get the company’s insurance info and called. It seemed like a pretty bare-bones insurer, and they used a third-party company to handle claims instead of doing it themselves. On the first call they told me the car wasn’t on their policy, which put me in a really tough spot, but on the second call they said it was probably such a new car that it was taking a while to show up on the insurance account, and they helped me out.
When the accident is the other driver’s fault and you claim through their insurance, it doesn’t go through your own insurance company, so you have to handle it yourself; your agent has no obligation to do it for you. So once you get the insurance info from the other driver, you have to reach out yourself, and if it’s not a big company, it can take a really long time. Knowing that, think about how you want to act, and when you can settle it with cash, that’s an option too.
