Now I have never had to submit a claim to my insurance before so was on completely new territory so I thought I would write this post to help someone else in the same situation.
The first thing we had to do was to phone the police on 101 to report the theft of the vehicle. After going through all the details I had to wait in for a crime scene investigator to come and fingerprint our window (the entry point by which they stole our keys) and then to wait for a police officer to come and take all the details and give us a crime reference number.
Whilst I was waiting for them I had to ring the insurers to let them know what was going on. This started the process of claiming for the vehicle and we had to go through lots of details about our licenses and the vehicle history. The insurers will ask as many questions as they can so that they can deal with the claim quickly and need the car documents sent to them so do have these to hand if you can when you phone them.
Luckily for us, we took out an extra part of our policy which enables us to be provided with a hire car whilst our claim is being dealt with. However, I was informed that this would take a couple of days and as we needed a car the next day I organised to hire a car from Avis in between to keep up mobile. It was really quick and simple to do and made our life so much easier. Thankfully it only took two days to organise a hire car through the insurers so we didn’t have long to wait.
We sent all of our paperwork to the insurers within 3 days of making a claim and ensured that they were sent signed for next day delivery so that they wouldn’t get lost on the way. This means that just 4 days in and the claim is already nearing completion and we are just waiting for a valuation of the car based on the service history we provided before we will receive a payout.
The speed in which this has all been dealt with is brilliant but unfortunately having your car stolen is still a very expensive problem.
The first issue we came to was the fact that we had left the girls DVD players and some DVDs in the car as well as our glasses and sunglasses which will all need replacing. We will also need to replace the girl’s car seats which will hopefully be covered by the insurance.
We are in the lucky position that we have a bit of money set aside which means we are able to go out and buy another (albeit cheaper) car before the insurers settle the claim but looking at insuring a new car is a real issue as our premium has more than doubled now we have to declare a claim. We should be getting some money back for the car that was stolen but it won’t be as much as we paid for it and by the time we pay for the more expensive insurance even with a cheaper car in return it is still going to seriously hurt our bank balance.
The people who stole our car took it for a laugh, a quick spin around the quiet nighttime roads, what they didn’t do was think about the impact it has on us.
We are still waiting for this nightmare to be over but an end is in sight and hopefully life will be back to normal soon.