Car Crash

We decided that instead of Marc coming to Boise the first weekend in May, that the kids and I would go down to Utah and we could see the new home and just enjoy the weekend playing, hiking, doing nothing together. The kids skipped school on Friday morning, we took the morning to sleep in a little and get packed and ready to go, then left to come meet Marc just as he was getting off work. I was making good time on the road, I was just out of Willard, traffic was getting a little heavier. The cars in front of me were slamming on their brakes. I was trying to slow down as fast as possible, I remember saying "Oh no, oh no!" and it became apparent that I was going to hit them unless I could swerve off the road. I swerved and avoided crashing into the two cars in front of me, but as I was going into the median, we heard a "crunch!" and I got plowed into from behind. The kids were screaming and upset. I was able to stay calm. The first I did was make sure my kids were ok, then I got out of the car to make sure everyone else involved in the accident was ok. Nobody really knew what to do. It was me who was suggesting calling 911 for the police department to report the crash and get someone on the scene. I was worried that my cell phone would take me to a dispatcher in Idaho, plus I had no idea where we were! It didn't take too long for the police to come. The first picture is the first van in the pileup, the second is the girl who caused the accident, the red van is mine, and the last is the jeep who hit us. 

I was surprised at how hard it was to get back on the freeway and keep driving after the accident. We were supposed to meet Marc at the new house in Draper, but he met us at the "Cheesecake Factory" in Downtown Salt Lake instead to cut down on driving time for me and give us a chance to decompress. I'll try to talk more about the weekend later. 

We were safe, it could have been so much worse. My car was still driveable. I could have been stuck in Utah with all the kids and no car to drive home in. We could have been hurt. We didn't have insurance because we were still in the first 90 days of Marc's job before benefits started. No one was hurt. I had to keep reminding myself as I got involved with all the car insurance crap that followed. Fortunately, since I was rear-ended and didn't hit anyone, the person in front of me was responsible for the damage to the car. We only had liability coverage on the car, so we would have really been up a creek. 

Since I'm writing this long after when it happened, I might as well include the "rest of the story".

I took the car into the auto body shop when we got home so they could put together an estimate for the insurance company. We arranged for me to take it in the following week to have repairs made and a Rental Car while the car was in the shop. 

Everything was going fine and dandy until I wasn't receiving updates about the car in the shop like they promised. On May 15, when I called to ask them about it, I was told they had found more damage to the frame once they had taken things apart. The estimated costs went up in order to get it fixed and I knew right then that the cost to repair the car was worth more than the value of the van. I started to freak out. We were in the middle of moving to another state, the house was being packed up the next weekend, and the insurance company was about to total out my vehicle leaving me with nothing to drive. State Farm called me that evening with their bad news and first offer of $4600 for the car. The person on the phone was nasty and cold. I lost it for awhile. I was so stressed out and upset. Marc was on his way home from Utah. As he and I talked, there was no way we could buy another car immediately. We were days away from closing on our house in Utah, accounts were in lockdown, it's not like we could take out a loan or anything on a car because we couldn't take on more debt while applying for a house. The best we could hope for was to try and get a little more money for the value of the car and extend the rental coverage. 

We got busy with researching how to get more out of the value of the car. We collected all of the receipts from the work we had done in December (almost $2500), registration receipt, the window sticker from the purchase of the car, and then we went to work trying to find comparable cars that were within 75 miles from us that the mileage of the van was close to 135,000. The advantage of doing all of this in Boise is that it's a much smaller car market, the cars are more expensive to buy there and anything in that range of mileage was in the upper 8-10,000. We put together our package of information and sent a very nice, but very straightforward email about how their first offer was not going to buy us a comparable car. 

I got a phone call from a nicer guy named Mike from State Farm later that Monday afternoon. He tried to sound like they were bending over backwards with their next offer of $6 something thousand dollars, plus tax and registration fees. I really thought that was the best we would get. I asked him if he would please send over the comparables they were using to get their number. When he sent over the emails, Marc and I had to laugh and be flabergasted all at the same time. The cars were from places like Texas with over 200,000 miles on them. Nothing close to our mileage on our van nor within 75 miles. Marc took over the conversations from there. He was able to negotiate another $3,000 bringing the total up to a little over $9,000!!!  I couldn't believe it. He even got us another week in the rental van. 

I got a settlement statement overnight ed to me on May 20. I had the title of my car and notarized signatures over to them the next day and I naively thought I would receive a settlement check by early the next week, like the Tuesday or Wednesday after Memorial Day. Oh, how wrong I was. We moved from Caldwell that weekend. We couldn't bring the bikes with us because we needed a trailer hitch to connect the bike trailer to. I called my neighbor to have her keep a look out for a large envelope on our front porch. Marc made contact with Mike, the State Farm guy and gave him our updated address. We kept thinking it was coming any day. I left the rental van in Boise when I came back the weekend of May 29, the finish school and clean the house. All 5 of us (the kids and I) drove a very stuffed Honda Civic back to Utah and then I was stuck without a car all week, being "stranded" on the top of a mountain mind you while I tried to piece our new house together. 

We finally called Mike back to figure out where the heck our check was, lovely State Farm lost the title to my van. They have record that they received it, but they didn't know where it went after that. We pretty much demanded that they get us another Rental. They ended up paying us for days without use of a vehicle. I didn't get a settlement check until June 11, 3 weeks after I sent in the title to my car. 

I had stalked cars on KSL for weeks. I was hoping to get a 2005 Odyssey that had a jumpseat in it and a DVD player. We ended up getting a 2004 Odyssey that had 65,000 miles on it. More than half the mileage our other van had on it, I felt like I sacrificed the jumpseat and the DVD for the mileage which is more practical in the long run.