A promise for a payment

Insurance is a promise of payment for all of your damages from a loss within the bounds of a policy in exchange for payment of your premiums.  In theory this sounds great, and when it works like it's supposed to it's a beautiful thing.  Unfortunately the entity making that promise is a for-profit company who loses profit by paying your claim.  The more they pay on your claim the greater their profit loss.  You can see how there is a great incentive for a for-profit entity to minimize claim payments. 

 It starts out innocently enough, one of their adjusters looks at your damaged property, or perhaps they looked at photos and have determined the amount of your damages from only photos, and almost instantaneously you get a check!  This check seems very low though, you look at the estimate to see how they arrived to that amount and you notice that they missed several bits of damage. Don't worry they tell you when you protest, we'll pay it on a supplement.  This sets the stage for the whole claim.  They are hoping that you take that small initial amount and use the money for something other than repairing your property and there will be no supplement.  After you have spoken to a couple of professionals you realize that the amount they offered you is WELL below the actual cost it will be to bring you back to pre loss condition.  That's okay though you think, they said they would pay it on a supplement.  

This is where things start to go sideways.  When they make an initial payment what they are doing is valuing a claim, and they have now severely undervalued it and will fight tooth and nail to keep it as close to that initial amount as they can.  They may issue a small supplement or two that still isn't enough to cover the damages to make it look like they are doing something, but getting them to even do that is like pulling teeth.  Eventually they will dig in their heels.  No amount of documentation or proof seems to budge them, they won't listen to reason, they purposely make it hard to contact them with long wait times and bouncing you around from rep to rep, speak in half-truths, try to turn you against your repairer,  and all kinds of other unsavory practices.  There are a whole host of tactics that an insurer will employ to keep that claim payment as low as possible and wear you down to get you to accept a smaller settlement than you are entitled to.  

You don't have to let them do this to you.  You can hire an expert who truly understands collision repair and policy to represent you.  In fact, the amount that an expert knows how to recover above what the average claimant or their body shop can on their own is almost always significantly more than enough to pay for that experts services.  Talk to us, we are happy to help you and have handled thousands of claims before yours.  We do this every day and know what to expect and how to handle their tactics.