What Is Used Car Insurance Salvage Value?

Reader question:

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.

Car Insurance Company Says My Car Is a Total Loss?

Reader question:

I recently totaled my car, and the amount that my car insurance company offered me for my car insurance total loss claim was a less than the amount noted in Blue Book. Can they do that?

Randy

They sure can.

Whenever you total a vehicle, your car insurance company pays you for the total cash value of the vehicle you total. While a good way to get this amount is to look in the Kelley Blue Book, it is anything but fool proof. Consider, for example, that cars experience wear and tear over the years, which brings down the amount that they are worth on the market, as well as in the salvage auction. Another thing that might lower the value you is if the car has been in an accident before and gotten repairs. Chipped paint, a bad transmission, anything will decrease the value of a vehicle, even if Blue Book says it should cost a certain amount.

In the end, the judgment must be made by you and your car insurance company to accept or deny an offered price. If you think that the amount they want to give you is not the correct amount, then you do not have to accept it. You can continue to negotiate with the claims adjuster, and if necessary bring in an attorney to help.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.