I’ve just been attending to an appointment with the insurance assessor covering the recent claim on my wife’s car. She had a minor accident in her workplace’s carpark when she swung a little wide and clipped a pole with the front end of the car. The repair quote has come in at around $3,300.

Whilst speaking with the assessor, we were chatting about the Viggen claim as well and he asked me if I had the car insured at an agreed value or at market value. I told him it was insured at an agreed value, but that the 9000 is just at market value.

He had a quick look at the insurance schedule for our 9000 and noted that it said the “sum insured” was around $8,000. What the schedule doesn’t tell you, though, is that your actual level of coverage is generally the lesser of the sum insured or the market value, as determined by the assessor. So the “sum insured” is basically a maximum level of coverage only, not a fait accompli.

When my wife had the accident, I looked up the market value using one of our industry sources here in Australia, the Red Book. The market value of the 9000 topped out at around $4,700 so a $3,300 quote might be pushing things into writeoff territory. I let the insurer know, though, that we’d much rather have the car fixed given that it’s very reliable and my wife likes to drive it.

The moral of the story is this - if you don’t have an agreed value established with your insurer then there’s a very good chance that your Saab might be under-insured. It didn’t cost me any more to have an agreed value placed on the Viggen when I bought it, and the fact that I did it might be the only thing that sees it getting repaired as the payout figure for a writeoff would be quite a bit higher than the current market value.

Check your policies, people.

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