practical things, I wish someone had told me.

car accident, one

car accident, two

car accident, three

When you head to you car one morning (early in March) and see that part of your rear bumper is cracked, consider filing a police report. I just figured someone had hit me trying to squeeze into a tight spot, but no….

A month and a half or so after that day, my parents got a phone call from an insurance company, I’ll call it company F. The nice people at F wanted to know if we had plans to file a claim on behalf of ourselves because of the accident. My mom asked what in the world they were talking about and got the whole story. (see pictures – it was an awful accident with three cars left undriveable, and the one who started it all didn’t have a license and was driving and un-insured car.)

The police supposedly left something on my car, but by the time I got to it, it wasn’t there (or was never left, depending on who you talk to…). The green guy behind me has the nice insurance company (F) and is doing his best to get another car.

The problem car (the “brown” one) is completely at fault but has no money or insurance to use to pay the people with totalled cars.

The guy in pink? He’s has decided to sue everyone on the police report list, and because my car is (technically) owned and registerred under my parents, they got a collections agency bill for over $2,000, because I was a part of the accident.

Why, you may ask, are we being sued? Who knows. What we do know is that up until today my “report” was unfinished, because they didn’t have my liscence number (and, two months later they still had made no effort to contact me OR my parents). My dad did try to go by there to get a report, but because he wasn’t the last one to drive it, he couldn’t get a copy of it, and couldn’t give them my info. Now that the report is “complete,” we’re hoping that this will solve the problem, but right now it’s a tangle of three different insurance companies (mine company and the guy behind me are the only ones playing nice) and a mess of “who was where, when?” My car was simply parked, and my bumper is cracked.

If you are parked on the street, and during the night something happens to your parked car – a dent, a cracked bumper, etc – consider calling the police station to inquire about if there was a larger accident, or to see if something on your street was reported druing the night/day/time you weren’t watching it.

Another thing? The company that keeps asking what you have in your wallet? They can take up to a month to complete a balance transfer; and just because you are seeing the “balance transfer” ammount on your statement doesn’t mean that they’ve actually sent the money to the other company. Right now I have an ammount of money on BOTH of my credit cards, and it’s been that way for over two weeks; neither company can tell me where the money is right now, and say I should wait another 5-10 days before calling them back. In the meantime, my balance periods are coming up, and now instead of just having a lump of money on my higher interest credit card, it’s sitting on both of them – gaining intrest by the day! (I could choose to stop payment on the transfer, but they’ll send fees after me, and there’s no guarentee that it’ll take less then a month to complete the transfer if I try it again….)

I’ve done some knitting, but the few rows I got done on the sweater sleeve aren’t very picture-worthy. Back to the books I go…..