June 15, 2016

Today’s video is on reading and understanding your auto insurance policy.

Understanding Your Auto Insurance Policy

People ask me all the time if I hate insurance companies. Of course not! I fight insurance companies. But one thing I don’t like about insurance companies is that their insurance policies don’t make a lot of sense to me, especially don’t make sense to most of my clients. Let’s begin with automobile coverage. Automobile insurance coverage is not usually an issue for you with what your policy says. Most of the time, insurance policy language matters to you regarding the guy who hit you. If you’re interested in understanding what insurance coverage is available for your claim when the injury or property damage was caused by another person, you want to look to their insurance company. When you read the insurance policies, you’re going to find that most things fall into three categories:

  1. number one, property insurance, property damage, rather.
  2. number two, bodily injury
  3. number three, uninsured motorist.

Let’s run through those.

Property Damage

Now this is when someone runs into your car, and they cause massive damage. Coverage will be that component of the insurance policy that will put your car back to the place it was before the accident.

Bodily injury

The second piece of it is the bodily injury piece. Now that’s when someone runs into you, and the insurance policy provides coverage of your medical expenses and future problems that you may have as a result of the accident.

Uninsured Motorist

The third piece sometimes becomes the most important. This is the uninsured motorist provision. Now this is something you read in your own policy, and it works like this: If I’m driving down the street and someone runs into me, but they don’t have insurance, does that mean I don’t have insurance coverage for the loss? Well, at that point, what you do is you look to the insurance policy that you have, and that provides coverage for you when you’re involved in an accident with someone who doesn’t have insurance policies. You’re going to find that either directly in this insurance policy, or in something called an umbrella policy that we’ll cover in another video. It’s always important for you to get a copy of the insurance policy of someone who causes and accident or to always have a copy of your own insurance policy in the event you run into someone, or someone runs into you, rather, and they don’t have insurance coverage. Reading insurance policies can be very complicated and frustrating. If you need help with your insurance claim, or just understanding your insurance coverage, give us a call. You take care of your family, and we’ll take care of the insurance company.