The Finances
The car was leased. It was month 13 of a 24 month contract. The insurance on the car covered new-for-old replacement, but only in the first year. I had no specific GAP cover...
For those who don’t know, if you write off a leased car, you basically buy the car off the leasing company, using the money the insurance company pay out.
Obviously, the concern with writing off a leased car is that perhaps the value the leasing company put on the car, and the value the insurance company put on it are different. Perhaps the leasing company think it’s worth £50k but the insurance company think it’s worth £40k. This leaves you with a bill from the lease company for £10k. If you have GAP insurance, that policy will cover the £10k. That’s a very simplistic explanation, but about right.
In reality, the insurance company and the leasing company communicated with each other without any intervention from myself. I don’t think I ever even said who my leasing company was. So wasn’t I surprised then, when I got this text from the insurance company...
They were sending me £3580
It seemed like a mistake, no way would the insurance company want to send me more money than they had to??? I called the leasing company, but they didn’t have any information to share and said they’d need to wait until they received the money and finalised the paperwork.
A couple of weeks or so later, I get this invoice from the leasing company...
They wanted to send me £606, and did via direct debit
My account with the leasing company is now closed. The insurance claim is now closed.
I crashed my car, and earned over £4K
Nuts.
