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Saturday, April 18, 2009

Why Car Insurance Write-offs Increase with Recessions

By Omri Hesthko

In the face of the current recessions and its probable long financial dry spell there have been reports of increased car insurance write-offs of cars. On top of that there were also increases in the number of car accidents which led to write-offs. This strange occurrence isn't confined to this recession but has also been observed in other times of economic contraction.

The thing is that this correlation between the write-off and amount of accidents happening makes no statistical or even logical sense if you look at it purely at the surface. There simply isn't anything physical that can link the two occurrences together. If you want to know the real reason behind this, you have to look further away from the surface of things and understand the nature of our fellow men that are put in a tight financial bind.

It is an unfortunate fact that some people in financial difficulties will turn to fraud and crimes just for the possibility of getting an insurance pay-off if they manage to con the insurance companies to write-off their cars. These people will actively damage their cars by smashing windows or setting fire to the engine-bay of their cars. Although the acts are despicable it is often hard to prove unless the criminal makes a very bad mistake and somehow make it obvious that they had a hand to play in the criminal acts.

Some of these insurance fraudsters will even go to the extent of driving their cars into barriers, fire hydrants and even other motorists just to make their claim look more believable. They are even willing to risk their lives just for a chance at obtaining a claim. The sad part about all of this is that most of these people do not understand how the claims process works. It could be months even years before all due investigation is completed and you receiving your claims. By this time your financial situation would have changed substantially.

Some other more daring individuals have even resorted to torching their own cars or even falsely reporting them stolen while parting out their vehicles for sale to junk yards. This criminal act is a very clear violation of the law and also the terms of the insurance. Even with this huge hammer hanging on top of their heads, some still think that it is worthwhile to do it simply in the hopes that an insurance pay-out will occur. Only if these people knew the trouble that they are buying themselves into, they won't make such an awfully wrong choice.

Most of the time if you find that you are having a hard time servicing your car loans or even if you can't seem to sell your car and it is really becoming a liability, it still isn't worth it to resort to criminal acts and insurance fraud. You can sell you car for cheap and restructure your car loans in such a way that you can still pay them off effectively over time. If your car insurance is heavy then you can reduce your coverage or even changing your policy to a third party option.

These increased incidences of less than truthful write-off claims have a very negative impact on the rest of the people in the insurance pool in the company. As a customer of the insurance company you will have to pay for any of these write-offs through your increased premiums. The unfortunate truth is that most insurance companies know that this is happening especially in these troubling economic times, as such those that do not have a fixed policy will end up having to pay for the extra risk that is involved. There is almost no way to avoid this as every car insurance company will face the same issue and thus will penalize every policy holder equally for this just to make sure they don't see a loss.

Basically it is due to these fraudulent activities of car insurance holders that have pushed car insurance quotes higher. There is nothing that you can do about it and you will simply have to accept that this is going to happen and understand that you aren't the only one that is getting an increase in car insurance premiums into the recession.

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