How do I know the used car insurance salvage value for my totaled vehicle?

Interesting question.

When your car is in an accident and is declared a total loss, there are usually a couple of options available to you. Either you can accept the total cash value and try to fix your car if it is that important to you, or if you were without gap insurance, or instead you can use the total cash value to buy yourself a new car and the car insurance company can take your totaled car to the junk yard to be sold as parts, in a used car insurance salvage sale.

In some cases, you will be able to see some of the money gotten from the salvaging of your vehicle, depending on what car insurance company you are with. The salvage amount that a car can be got for is more often than not about five to twenty percent of the vehicle’s total cash value. There is no set price to determine what the value will be, but the people that salvage these things tend to have a computer database with information of all of the salvages they have done in the past. They use that information from before to determine how much they will sell a part from now, based on the type of car.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

What does car insurance depreciation have to do with the claims process?

Maya

Good question.

Depreciation is something that can put many new car owners into a bad spot if they total their car. The deal is that the second you take your car out of the car dealership, its price drops significantly. In the first couple of years or so that you own the car, its price continues to drop quickly, and then peters out over the remaining years. This is called car insurance depreciation, and it is what determines how much you get paid for a total loss when you make a claim.

Your car insurance company pays you what is called the cash value of the car when it is totaled, and this is the depreciated amount, not the amount you bought the car for. Even for a new car, this amount is often a lot less than it would take for you to finish paying off your car finance loan. This is why it is a good idea toget gap insurance, so that if your car gets totaled you can pay off your loan and get yourself another car as well.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

What are auto insurance groups?

Andy

Good question.

In auto insurance, the car insurance companies give you a certain premium price based on who you are, what you do, what you drive. Having a high performance car can get you a raise, as can having a new car, or bad credit, and especially a bad driving record. That last one and the first one might also be big contributor to you having a hard time getting a car insurance policy taken out at all. There are many factors that go into the final decision.

These have a lot to do with the auto insurance group that you are placed in. There are three basic auto insurance groups. They are:

• high risk
• average risk
• preferred risk

The first one is of people who have several speeding tickets, a high performance car, are male and under the age of twenty five and so on. The second one includes people who might have a ticket a year ago, a new car, and mediocre credit. The last group is of the best drivers with the best car insurance qualities. The group that you fall into determines who will insure you and how much it will cost.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

You may also consider dropping your car insurance if you are driving an old car. Your car insurance wont pay for the repairs anyway.Check for any programs with your insurance company regarding driver’s refresher course. This would help lower your monthly premiums if you are 55 or older.

If you are a teenager and still in school, make sure to get a clean driving record. Check with your insurance company also if you are entitled to a “Good Student Discount” on their car insurance.

Make sure you check online and shop around so you can compare car insurance prices. This will ensure you of getting the best car insurance rate in New Hampshire.

Goodluck!

-MariCAR

I’m getting a new car and they give you the option to pay extra for side impact air bags. If I do this, will I get cheaper rates on my car insurance premium?

Randy

Probably.

Everything depends on the company, but most car insurance companies will give you safe driver insurance discounts when you add safety features to your car, especially when those features are air bags. You don’t necessarily get more of a discount the more safety features you add, but if you make an effort to diminish the possibilities of extreme damage when or if your car gets into a crash and needs collision coverage, then you are going to get rewarded for it by your company with a car insurance discount.

Some people wonder if we even need side air bags. Every car that comes out on the market is so loaded down with safety features that it’s enough to make people wonder if it makes any sense. Can all of that so called safety really save lives, or is it just a gimmick to sell cars? Accidents still happen right? Right, but less do, and the ones that do cause less damage and injury when there are safety features involved, so this trend will probably continue.

At the beginning of the year, crash tests were performed with cars that did not have side impact air bags and then the same type of car that did, to see what the differences were in the results. It came out that they really do work and can save lives. This is especially important for side impacts, which cause most of the fatalities in accidents because they hit at least one passenger or driver head on. Side impact air bags decreases the possibility of both injury and death, and for that reason car insurance companies are rushing to hand out discounts to anybody with these.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.