FINALLY!!!!!

Exactly 45 days after my car accident, we received the money from the insurance company. Seriously! And now that we are done with this stupid process, I will shout it from the rooftops and tell everyone I know that they should never, under any circumstances, use an insurance company called American Commerce. I've never dealt with a more incompetent group of people in my life.

It took them three weeks to perform the market analysis on my car and determine that it was a total loss. Since then, we've been trying to get the settlement offer from them. Just to be clear...the settlement offer should equal the dollar value of the market analysis. So it's not rocket science to simply transfer the dollar value from the market analysis onto a piece of paper and send it to me, right? Wrong.

They said their system showed that the settlement offer had been mailed to me on X date. And it never showed up. So I called back again. And this time they tell me that the settlement offer had been mailed on Y date. And it never showed up. So I finally turned this over to Cory since I wasn't getting anywhere. And he was ruthless. :-) Our friendly neighborhood insurance agent's name is Tracy. And after Cory was done with Tracy, she could recognize his voice the minute he called (i.e. he no longer had to give the case number to identify himself). The first day he tried to call Tracy, he kept getting sent to her voice mailbox. So he started to leave five minute messages of nothing. And then he'd call back and do it again. Just so she would have to check her voicemail and listen to nothing for five minutes. Perhaps Tracy finally got the message because she eventually spoke to Cory and agreed to email us a copy of the settlement offer.

Since American Commerce doesn't have a local office here in Idaho Falls, we had to sign a power of attorney form and send that, along with my car title, in order to get the settlement check. You can imagine my trepidation with sending my car title off to this company that is an absolute joke. Since we NEVER received a settlement offer in the mail, despite numerous times of them assuring us that it was sent, I really never thought we would see a check from them. I sent the title via FedEx so I would have a tracking number and I also included a nasty letter in the package. I advised them that due to the "undue hardship and emotional stress" that they have caused, I expected that I would receive a check from them by X date or else they would be required to extend my rental car allowance until such a time as I did receive the check. It must have worked (i.e. perhaps they sensed a lawsuit on the horizon) because they did extend the rental car allowance until yesterday. And yesterday is when we received the check. Unbelievable!

In retrospect, we may have done things differently. We deliberately chose not to file the claim with our insurance company because the accident wasn't my fault. We didn't want to have to pay our deductible and then have the accident go against my driving record while we were waiting for our insurance company to get a settlement out of American Commerce. But it may have been worth it. Battling an insurance company as an individual is an exhausting ordeal.