The $71-a-Month Policy That Denied My $6,411 Claim
Switching carriers last October saved $564 a year. The new policy had a $1,000 deductible, no rental, and I waived uninsured motorist. In March an uninsured Honda hit my RAV4. The repair bill: $6,411. My uninsured motorist claim was denied. Collision paid $5,411; the rest came out of my pocket.
Denied. The word sat halfway down a letter from Meridian Mutual, dated March 20, and I read it standing in the cab of my truck outside a job site in Glendale at 7:02 in the mornin', coffee steaming in the cupholder and the crew unloading ladders behind me. Under it, in slight type: uninsured motorist property damage — declined at policy inception. The RAV4 two spots over had a crumpled tailgate and a body shop estimate I had not opened yet.
That estimate, from the shop on 43rd Avenue, came to $6,411. Six thousand four hundred eleven. The RAV4 hauls my tools and ladders to four job sites a week, my wife Priya's commute runs 34 miles each way, and our savings held $2,300 on the day of the accident. One of us was going to miss work.
The switch happened last October, for exactly one reason. $47 a month cheaper. The new checkout page had a green banner promising drivers like me an average of $564 in yearly savings, and the whole purchase took eleven minutes on my phone while the Fit charged in the garage. The part that denied my claim lives on page four of a 38-page PDF, and I put it there myself.
the ad that promised $71 a month
Last October the State Farm renewal hit $118 a month for the RAV4 and the 2013 Fit together. An ad during a Suns game promised cheap car insurance at $71 a month for "the same coverage," from a company whose name I recognized only from its own ads. I ran two auto insurance quotes that night and liked the second one. The app asked for my license number, my card, and a signature. Eighty-one seconds — the app timed it and showed me the number at the end, like a scoreboard.
page four of the policy packet
The policy arrived as a 38-page PDF, and I read the declarations page twice and the rest not at all. The deductible was $1,000, up from $250. Page four also showed no rental reimbursement, no roadside, and — on a line I can now recite from memory — uninsured motorist property damage: declined. Arizona makes you sign a waiver to reject UM coverage, and the website had that waiver as a checkbox between "paperless billing" and "agree to terms." I clicked it to finish faster.
the Honda at Camelback and 44th
March 11, 5:15 in the evenin'. A Civic ran the left-turn signal on Camelback and hit the RAV4's tailgate at about 30 miles an hour, and the whole thing took less time than one light cycle. The driver was maybe 19, with no card, no app, nothin'. The police report listed him as uninsured, citation 26-04471. Nobody was hurt, and the money part was bad enough on its own.
the letter that said denied
Meridian's adjuster, a man named Curtis who apologized twice in the first minute, called it "an unfortunate gap in coverage" on a Wednesday call I took standing in the body shop parking lot between two sedans with their bumpers off. The letter repeated the phrase in writing: declined at policy inception. I had filed under uninsured motorist for the full $6,411, assuming — wrongly — that is what it was for. Collision did still apply. Meridian paid the shop $5,411 and the $1,000 in the middle was mine.
the $28-a-day Corolla
The rental was never covered, which I knew and still forgot til the shop said the RAV4 would sit ten working days waiting on a tailgate assembly from a Toyota depot in California. Enterprise charged $28 a day for a Corolla. Eighteen days, cuz the tailgate assembly went on backorder, $504 for a car I did not want or need. Add that to the $1,000 deductible and the real cost of saving $47 a month was $1,504 in cash, so far.
small claims and a July hearing
I sued the Civic driver in justice court for the deductible, the rental, and the $86 filing fee — $1,590 all in, filed on a lunch hour with a clerk who had seen this exact case forty times before mine. He never responded to the service. The hearing is a defaults hearing, July 14, and the clerk says defaults typically go fast. Whether I ever collect is a separate question, and the clerk was honest about that too. Garnishing a 19-year-old's wages is a theory, not a plan.
the switch back in April
State Farm took me back the first week of April at $129 a month: $250 deductible, rental included, uninsured motorist stacked at the limit, and a rider for the tools in the bed. The Fit stayed too. I asked the agent, a patient woman named Rosa, whether I had absorbed anything worth learning. She said most people call back after the second accident, not the first. Cheap car insurance showed up first in my search results again this month, same green banner, same promise. I scrolled past it in about a second. The Meridian letter still rides in my truck's door pocket, folded to the word Denied, right where it was at 7:02 on the mornin' I read it. That is it. One checkbox, $1,590, and a policy that was never $71 worth of coverage. That is the whole bill.