Forgot to update on the fiasco State Farm put us through yet again when I hit a deer with the wife’s jeep. Early to mid October I smashed a deer around a curve at 60mph, no chance to avoid as it’s one of those times the deer was determined to die. Thankfully the second deer turned away once we hit the first. Obliterated the front driver side of the 21 Grand Cherokee L. Surprisingly didn’t pop me in the face with an airbag.
File the claim next day (Monday), and 2 days later the shop has an estimate sent to SF (15k bucks, not totaled though). A week goes by, nothing. I call my agents office and they tell me “Ya it’s processing. Claims has the estimate.”
Another week goes by, I call the shop. They haven’t heard anything and I ask if they can go ahead and start ordering parts and working on it, which they agree even tho the estimate hasn’t been approved yet. By the 3rd week I’m fairly pissed, the jeep isn’t done and the estimate isn’t approved, I call my local agent and get one of her reps that’s useless. I call claims three times and they promise me they are working on it, by that Friday of the third week still no estimate approval.
I call claims on a Saturday, I ask what is going on, they said the estimate somehow got lost in translation, for a better term. They blame it on their third party adjusters. Either way I told them I’d be screwed if we didn’t already have a third vehicle and it shouldn’t take this long to get a vehicle fixed after a deer hit. I message my agent and ask for a rental car to make State Farm pay more anyhow, welp found out we didn’t have it on our policy.
The estimate gets approved the following Monday, so start of our 4th week without the jeep. A check is then sent in the mail, because we have a lien they can’t just deposit it electronically. They ask me if I want it in the lien holders name or shops name, I told them I want it in the shops name. We wait 7 business days to receive this check, and SF put the lien holders name on it, our lien holder is out of KS so even if I overnighted it the bank would probably snail mail the check to the shop for them to finish it.
I was livid at this point. Called my agent told her to cancel the check and asked if there was any other way we can get a new payment without waiting another 7 days. SF claims allowed my agent to write the check directly to the shop, why the fuck we couldn’t do this in the first place is a damn mystery.
To top it off, the jeep had to go to a dealership after being fixed bcuz the dealers haven’t released to shops how to reprogram the computers for the new safety parts installed/fixed. So after a deer hit, it took a month and a half to finally receive our vehicle back.
Our bad luck continued, my daily driver (05 Trailblazer) broke down on me 3 days after we got the jeep back, transmission decided it didn’t have any gears after it was warmed up. Quick internet search and all I needed to change were the 4 solenoids and filter in the transmission, and it ran again, which were fairly easy to do, plus was only 80 bucks for all the parts.
But wait, there’s more! While the trailblazer was broke down, my wife went to drive my Ram 2500 to work since I took her jeep… Both batteries dead in the diesel. 5 year old AGMs so I suppose it is about time I replace those too. This was the day I found out my wife didn’t know how to hook up the NOCO battery charger
, thank god for FaceTime! 5-600 bucks later for batteries…..
You thought I was done? Nah, our sewer decided to back up in our basement on a Saturday afternoon, I tried to snake it myself but needed an industrial grade one, they couldn’t come do that until Monday, called multiple plumbers. The city had recently jetted out the main and my neighbor had an issue the day prior, so pretty sure they blew stuff into our mains because the plumbers got all the way to the end of our service line and punched whatever was blocking it.
All of this happened around a month before Christmas, you know, a kinda expensive time of year lol. We still had a great Christmas and we are still on schedule to pay off the AR230 next week (5ish years early).
Life man, what can go wrong will go wrong! Just glad we have been fiscally responsible for a couple years now that it didn’t sting as bad as it could have. Here’s to a better start to the new year though!
