I Made This Auto Insurance Mistake, and It Cost Me Hundreds

Many years ago, I was involved in a car accident. I had auto insurance coverage, which I thought would protect me against the losses a collision caused. But unfortunately, I had failed to learn the key details of my policy at the time, and I was missing a very important type of coverage.

Because of this oversight, I ended up being out hundreds of dollars following the incident. Here's what happened and why I'll never make that mistake again.

I found out I was missing this insurance coverage after it was too late

When I was involved in the accident, my boyfriend at the time was driving my vehicle and there were questions about whether my insurance would be responsible or the insurance of the other driver who was in the crash. Unfortunately, the accident was a pretty serious one, and my car ended up being totaled. This means the damage was so bad, it would have cost more to fix than it was worth, and the insurer would be giving me a check for the value of the vehicle.

The problem was, there were a lot of issues that had to be worked out before I got that check. The insurance companies were investigating to try to determine who was actually to blame for the accident, and the insurer also needed to make an assessment of how much my vehicle was actually worth so it could pay me a fair amount.

All of this ended up taking weeks and, since my car was totaled but I still needed a vehicle to get to school, I had to get a rental car. And here's where the problem came in. When I bought my auto insurance coverage, I neglected to buy rental car reimbursement coverage. Without that, my insurance company didn't pay anything for the rental car that I needed to have for about three weeks.

Today, the average daily cost of a rental car is around $93 to $132, depending on the metro area where you rent one. My accident happened a long time ago. At that time and with the discounts that I got for my extended rental and the fact I chose a small compact car, I ended up paying just under $1,000.

That's still a lot of money out of my checking account, though, and much more than I wanted to spend. And it could have been avoided had I just had the right insurance coverage, since adding rental car reimbursement to auto insurance costs around $4 a month.

Make sure to have the right auto insurance before an accident happens

Unfortunately, I didn't discover that I was missing important insurance coverage until after an accident had happened, when it was too late to buy it. But others don't have to make that mistake.

Every driver should check their insurance policy carefully to make sure they have the coverage they need, including insurance to pay for a rental car if they would need transportation after an accident while waiting for their insurance check to fix or repair their car. It is far better to find out before a crash when there's still time to buy more coverage than to learn a hard lesson when there's no insurance to pay for big expenses when something has gone wrong.