I really need to scream into the void right now.
I know this is a first world middle class problem. To preface, I’ve been living paycheck to paycheck for a very long time and i have panic attacks on public transportation. This vent is long and complicated … I apologize…
In 2021, just as we were starting to look for a new place, when covid restrictions were finally lifting, and our car threw a rod. So we were forced to use our moving funds to make a down payment on a cheap but newesh car. A mitsubishi mirage for 28000 plus interest. It would look shiny on our credit report and a new car was less likely to come with hidden costs. The payment wasn’t bad an we got a good loan from a credit union. We thought we’d be okay, because we didn’t know (like the rest of the us) that rent was about to increase drastically. It jumped 400+ dollars in our case which swiftly went to battle with the new car payment… and unfortunately the car itself. We’ve found - because it did not do well in the us - parts fior the mirage are expensive mostly because they have to be ordered from out of state. I.E. We lost 3 tires and the spare over the course of the year to various pitfalls in our states crappie roads. We literally had to buy the tires through the internet ourselves and have them shipped to the shop. Thats how rare parts fir our car are…
This has eaten our savings but we were confident we could scrape together enough to move to a studio somewhere, closer than my current 2 hour commute. This May we finally paid off the interest and began paying off the car itself…
So we’ve been juggling and preparing the best we can to move this year, it was going to be tight but manageable until Black Friday. My husband is a private contractor to deliver food with uber and one hour into his Black Friday run he was rear ended by a truck. Everyone was fine, the guy admitted fault right away and other than some confusion about our incident - changing 4 hands within his insurance company -everything was going smoothly. The car was drivable despite the back end being a crumpled mess. It was drivable except on days that weather prevented him from working which were a lot this winter.
It took over a month but finally we got our car into the collision shop. They declared it a total loss… Because it’s been driven so much the value of the 2020 mirage was set at 13000. Which is what they will pay directly to the loan from the credit union. Which leaves us with about 15k to pay off … I’m sure that we can refinance but the real issue… We don’t have 2,000 to put down on another car, and in the very least I still have to drive 80+ miles daily in rush hour conditions.
It’s declared totalled so our options are to sell it to the insurance company for 13k (directly into the car loan) or keep it minus the estimated salvage that the insurance company would have gotten (which comes to 11k straight into the car loan). This means we could drive and keep the car but with a lot of costs… paying for a salvage title, new plates, new registration, the taxes on the total value of the car, and whatever repairs our insurance company deems applies to our car being insurable which is more money out of pocket. This car is our lifeline, its how I get to my job with a massive commute and fear of being in crowds & my husband whos a driver doing his preferred job at all. He’s now looking for somewhere closer to home to work. I can’t work from home indefinitely… Our last resort seems to be taking out a predatory loan because we’ve already got the car loan open… which means no savings for the move in April… So… FML.
TLDR: How the hell is this insurance considered ‘full coverage’ … seriously … insert frustrated Beeker noises here
/venting and railing against an unfair insurance and home rental system