Insurance Adjuster Arriving this Sunday…

Why is the shop honest? Because they gave a higher quote and said something needs to be totaled when it’s not?

Not to say insurance is right by any means but this is the big disparity. Let’s believe the shop who has benefit because of a bigger repair bill and what we want to hear maybe vs what’s actually owned per policy or situation.

Honestly OP it sounds like you’re pretty much the training examples of some of the major carriers and how insurance is viewed/worked.

Please provide photos/details on vehicle and damage etc

Do nothing and wait for the adjuster to do their job. You don’t get to decide what’s totaled or not. You can switch insurance anytime, barring any contract conditions. This claim will remain with your current policy and your current insurer.

> I have been told that insurance can total the vehicle if they want to and I could even request to do that.

You can always ask, but as an appraiser I only ask the customer what they want to do in cases where it’s *almost* totaled, and only in a very narrow set of circumstances.

Oklahoma has the lowest statutory total loss threshold of any state at 60% of the pre-loss value of the vehicle. (Iowa used to be 50% but they changed that.) I just flipped through the [Oklahoma salvage statute](https://law.justia.com/codes/oklahoma/title-47/section-47-1111/) but I don’t see anywhere that it excludes cars solely damaged by hail, like Texas and some other states do.

The insurer *has to* salvage the vehicle at 60% even if the shop gets 99% done with the repair and just goes over by $1, so fixing heavily damaged vehicles in a state with a threshold that low is generally something to be avoided.

It doesn’t hurt to tell the appraiser (if you get the chance) that you’d rather not have it back. It’s usually easier in borderline circumstances for me to nudge the car over the edge of the cliff than it is for me to try to find corners to cut to avoid totaling something you *don’t* want totaled. Totaling a car over an uncertainty is a lot easier to justify after-the-fact than having to explain why you fixed a car that should have been totaled. There’s an appraiser mantra that goes “When-in-doubt…total-it-out”.

> I have also been told (all this through the collision shop btw) to put the vehicle in a shady area so all the damage can be seen properly and the insurance goes for a high repair amount.

This is true. Not tree-shade though. That’s worse than no shade at all. What they mean is if you put the car under an overhang or canopy of some sort (like a garage or carport) and you look across a hail damaged panel towards a sunlit area, it’s a lot easier to see all the dents. This is especially true if the car is a light color like silver or white or champagne colored. Those are a bitch to do hail estimates on in sun. Some insurers will rent a circus tent and set it up in a Walmart parking lot where they can drive the cars through it, just to do the estimates.

If the vehicle is *not* totaled you can still do what I call a “self-total”. You can always take the insurance check and just go sell or trade the car for its new reduced value. If the insurance check + the new value is roughly the same as what you could have sold it for before the day before the storm then you don’t really lose much.

If the car is *not* totaled and the hail wasn’t big enough to split the paint you can sometimes apply the insurance payment to any loan balance (or just pocket it if there’s no loan) and just keep driving the vehicle, and/or sell it privately later. If there are splits in the paint then you’d want to address those as they will eventually create rust spots.

Car dealers will have “hail sales” where they “discount” the sale price of hail damaged inventory. The good part is that they can have a car that they got an insurance payment on, and sometimes still sell it as-is for a lot more than the residual value of the car. Like the car is worth $20k, it incurs a $14k hail damage claim, and then they sell it as-is for “half-off”(!) the original price, and end up netting $24,000 for a $20,000 car. That sort of thing. You can do the same thing. Nothing illegal or unethical about it. The damage is all open and obvious to the buyer and it’s up to them to determine what they’d pay for it in that condition.

> Also, am I allowed to change my insurance during the claim?

Yes. Nobody cares. Whatever company insured it on the day of the storm has to eat the loss. As an appraiser I wouldn’t even know (nor would I care) if you switched after the loss. It changes nothing about how I handle your claim.

> Progressive allows Loan/Lease payoff so is it wrong to add it now?

You can add it but it wouldn’t apply to this loss. The coverages in effect on the date of loss are what apply. Home and auto claims are tied to the date of loss. It doesn’t work like health insurance where it revolves around the date of service.

It’s not fraud to add it unless you lie about the date of loss to try to rig it so the coverage was in effect. It simply wouldn’t apply since you added it after the date of loss.

As others have said loan/lease payoff wouldn’t apply since it’s not active for the current date of loss but more importantly you wouldn’t even get anything from it since you will have a good amount of positive equity so that coverage doesn’t even apply. I don’t think I have had a single Toyota total loss claim that got anything from that coverage. A Kia or Hyundia? I wish more of those vehicles had their customers elect loan lease payoff and didn’t have $2k deductibles