Non Fault Claim (or is it?)

Quentin

Who did you put the claim into? (Your own insurer or the insurer of the "guilty" party) ie who sent you the money, and did you have to initially pay your excess and get that paid back to you separately?

mkukster

We never dealt with the other insurer. To be honest we dont even know who the other insurance company was. We had to pay out the excess intially and it was paid back to us.


It does seem good to talk about these things. I have trawled several websites and have now managed to find out that "your NCD is affected until the costs are recovered from the other party". So I probably was incorrect in answering question 3. However, there is still an ambiguity because all you know is that you have had your money. You would probably assume that it has all been sorted (especially after 15 months).


Also, in my opinion (as you mentioned above) the answer to question 2 should always be Yes. In my understanding if you are declaring an accident then you always initially claim against your policy and then hope for an admission of liabililty and to then to get the money back from the other party.


I guess what I have learnt is that it is probably best to pick up the phone when getting your insurance rather than relying on answering questions on websites. Speaking to an customer service agent yesterday this particular situation is quite a common occurence but normally happens because people are trying to cover up the fact that there has been a claim against their policy by a third party.


What we also didnt know until yesterday was that you should get some sort of correspondence from the insurance company in the form of a letter which notifies you when the claim has been fully resolved. It will be interesting if this happens.

Quentin

mkukster wrote: »

We had to pay out the excess intially and it was paid back to us......

...... in my opinion (as you mentioned above) the answer to question 2 should always be Yes. In my understanding if you are declaring an accident then you always initially claim against your policy and then hope for an admission of liabililty and to then to get the money back from the other party....

Who did you get your excess back from?


Regarding question 2, you should answer it truthfully - you answered incorrectly! (It isn't true that you "always" claim against your own policy (eg. You can't if you only have 3rd party cover/ when involved in an incident where liability is clear cut with the third party it is much better not to claim off your own comprehensive policy but to claim off the third party directly (avoids paying your excess/losing ncd temporarily/easier to get repairs done at your choice of repairer) which had you done would have saved you all this trouble!

mkukster

I am learning a lot from this "experience". I always believed that when you have an accident you report the it to your insurers and they then deal with it. I wouldn't have even known (if I am understanding your post) that you can claim directly from the other insurers. I'll be certainly making an effort to ask more questions in the future. Fingers crossed we wont ever need to.


For me there is no longer any point dwelling on what has happened. I have just taken out a new policy and received a much better explanation of the finer points of some of the terminology speaking to someone on the end f a phone than answering some of the questions on the website.