Wife got in a minor accident this afternoon. Neither of us have been in one before. Definitely her fault. We’ll have insurance pay for the other car. I expect that our rates will get hiked but here’s the question: Will my rates go up less if I don’t also claim our cars damage? I’m thinking it’s about $2000 in damage and the deductible is $1000. Or will the rates generally increase the same whether we have the insurance pay for our car or not? If anyone has experience here thanks in advance.
The short answer is that it varies from company to company. How old are you and your wife? If this is your first accident I would get my car fixed.
Mid 30’s. No accidents and no tickets on either end. We’re definitely going to fix it but not sure whether I should just pay for it out of pocket or let the insurance do it.
For a lot of companies it's the amount of claims and not necessarily the claim amount. I'm with Progressive, and my wife got into an accident that wasn't her fault, and in order to speed things up I considered making a claim on my insurance (since it wasn't our fault) and he explained the process to me. For them the amount wasn't that big of a deal, they just mentioned that making a claim period would affect future rates. With this being your 1st, and you HAVE to make the claim, I would go on ahead and just claim both sets of damage.
Do some research on how insurance companies rate claims. For example, when I lived in NC, insurance companies based accidents on a point system like they do with traffic violations. It ranged from something like 0-$2500, 1 pt. 2500-10,000, 2 pts. $10,000+ 3 pts. All insurance companies will use some type of formula. It seems like your best recourse is to make a claim.
