I won the insurance lottery.
I walk away from an unusual accident without a scratch, and with a satisfying payout.
My car insurance costs a fortune. About £1200 a year. Maybe more, actually. I can’t bear to look.
I get it.
My 2 cars are worth <£10,000, but that’s not the point. The point is that I’m being insured against the danger of rounding a rural corner with too much pace and rear ending your expensive combine harvester.
But realistically, that’s very unlikely to happen. I have two kids, which my insurers know, and I putter around incredibly cautiously. And I only putter around when I need to take them somewhere. Otherwise I take the bus. I’ve actually done the math and it would be cheaper to get rid of car number 2 - the backup, and take taxis on the odd occasion that we need it (once a week when S- has to go to work and I look after kids, and on not infrequent occasions when car 1 is in repair shop, like when I had my accident…)
I’ll tell you about it.
I went to New Zealand for 5 months last November. I parked car 1 in our garage. The first garage I have had to park my car in for more than 20 years, since I lived at my parent’s house (my home?).
8 weeks into my trip, I got a message from Cousin T- who came to housesit/experience semi-rural Norfolk for some reason known only to God (T- himself was a bit confused at first but wound up having a blast driving expensive farm machinery - a tale for another time)
He pinged us to say he’d followed a pong into the garage and found Car 1 in wretched state - blanketed in mold (mould?)
He had taken it to a car valet centre that had never seen the like. It was going to cost £800 + VAT to clean.
Well, what could we do?
We paid it, and got it clean.
And to me, that was an accident.
And that’s what I told my insurer.
No, they said. It’s wear and tear.
WEAR AND TEAR????
No, I said. Precautions were taken. Car was garaged. Something unexpected and deleterious happened. An accident, I would go so far as to claim.
Administration happened. Emails sent back and forth. Photos attached. An inspector dispatched to see the now clean car and take a statement from S-.
Weeks pass, and then, out of the blue, into our bank account plops…
The full whack, minus our excess, no impact on our no claims bonus (violence against language… but that’s another story).
I won the insurance lottery.
And walked away from my accident without a scratch.