Handel on the law

Have you ever listened to the radio show Handel on the law? It’s a syndicated show that has been around for years. According to his website Handel has been on since 1985, you can check the website out here www.handelonthelaw.com. It lists all the air times if you want to check it out. He describes his show as “bold, entertaining and addictive”.  I agree it is bold and entertaining part. It's kinda like wings served at Hooters. Addictive? Well, it’s pretty solid. I haven’t had to call my therapist to discuss Handel addiction. But maybe that will be a thing someday. 
What I have noticed over the years is that he gets tons of insurance questions. I thought it would be interesting to give an actual insurance agent's perspective on some of these calls. I was able to tune in on Saturday for about an hour before my daughter's track meet. So, in my attempt to continue to give marginal insurance advice here are my takes on a few calls that he got.
The first call was from a guy who was driving around with no insurance. Gold star to this guy by the way! He got hit by someone who had insurance, win for him. Somehow, I feel like the perfect karma situation should have brought two uninsured people together in an accident and let them figure out what to do. But, apparently that’s not what happened. This man’s question was; can he really collect money to fix his car even though he didn’t have any coverage himself?
I have been on the other side of this one. One of my clients was insistent that she wouldn’t have to pay a dime for the other persons car since they were uninsured. Why would she have to pay for someone who was breaking the law, right? I had to explain that her insurance will indeed be paying for the other person’s car because she was at fault in the car accident. She wasn’t happy about this, but here’s the thing. Just because the other party is driving around without insurance doesn’t negate their legal right to have their car fixed. If the uninsured person has an at fault accident they will put themselves in a very costly spot between defending lawsuits and having judgement's against them. So, don’t worry about them.  Just know your insurance will still pay out for the other party and for your car even if they don't have insurance.
The second call was a total disaster. Handel hung up on this guy. He was all over the map telling his story. Here’s what I could glean from this call. It sounded like the caller had an accident. He had hired an attorney to represent him, the attorney did some work and then told him that since the claim wasn’t filed within 14 days he wouldn’t be able to collect from the other party. It sounded more like an excuse for this attorney to drop the case. The caller was wondering if he still had to pay his attorney.
There are two parts to this nonsensical call. The first part is how long do you have to file a claim? In California you have two years to file a claim for injuries and three years to file a claim for damage to your car. Now, should you wait this long, hell no! From my experience the vast majority of people have lapses in insurance.  If you run into a pole in a parking lot and then call insurance three years later, first you aren’t going to remember the date or have proof of when the accident happened. If you had any lapses during that time the company could just deny the claim. You can’t prove when you had the accident. So, don’t wait to file a claim. If you don’t want to get it fixed right away fine. But, at least call it in, get a claim number and then they will have a date the accident happened on record and you can get paid out. The second part was about legal fees. If you have an accident and have insurance, your insurance company will pay to defend you or file suit on your behalf. It doesn’t show up on your declarations page but it is part of your insurance provisions. If you just decide to hire your own attorney to sue someone, yes you will be responsible for their fees, unless it was contingent on the attorney settling the case and taking money from the settlement to pay themselves.
The last call that I heard was a husband calling in because his wife got hit by a Pizza Hut driver and was injured. Ah, delivery drivers. So, here’s the scoop. If you are driving delivery for a fast food place you had better make sure your insurance actually covers you. There are certain companies that will deny claims for delivery drivers because it is considered business use. In this case it sounds like the driver had minimal auto insurance coverage that paid out. So, it was probably some pimple faced kid driving his beater car for some extra cash after school. He was probably reaching into the box and sneaking a slice of pizza. As he was reshaping the pizza to make it look like nothing was missing he looked up too late and ran into a car. Once the kids insurance paid out what happens? Well, in this case you have a giant company behind the driver. So, what do you do? You hire one of those accident injury attorneys. They will jump all over this case. Why? Because there are deep pockets to go after. And the attorney will probably make a pretty nice settlement with Pizza Hut. 
So, that’s the Handel on the law weekly insurance review. It’s a fun show, you can literally hear Handel’s slow burn on certain calls before he loses his mind. When you are ready to talk about insurance give me a call at 951-395-0754 or visit www.socalinsured.com.