There is a lot of misleading information on the Internet, we see it everyday and it’s certainly nothing new. Sometimes we may read something that is just slightly wrong or misleading, sometimes there is little or no result to the information other times the results can be very drastic. As reader of this blog or information resources on our website you should know that speaking to an attorney is extremely important after an accident. We really cannot give that advice enough and for very good reason and you will soon see. For starters you should understand that unless you have a lawyer you really have no one protecting your interests, you are going to deal with a big company that wants to keep their money as much as possible. You should also be aware of their tactics used to minimize payouts and sometimes not pay any money at all.

Now lets take a look at one these tactics by using a real life example. I was browsing the web the other day and came along a very interesting article, this article gives advice on what you should do after a car accident. The following web site link is real and is from a web site that normally gives great information on a wide variety of topics. I happened to stumble upon this page on accident and was blown away by what I read. The article is called ‘5 Steps to filing your auto insurance claim’. Lets just take a look at step 1.

1. Evaluate whether or not you should file a claim: Did you know that just when you call your insurance company with a question about possibly filing a claim it is often recorded on your insurance record? It is important to keep your insurance record clean and one way is deciding whether or not you should file a claim. It doesn’t matter if the accident is your fault or not, you should ask yourself first if you can pay for the damage. Simply put, if you can pay for it yourself without financial hardship, don’t file the claim.

The above text is pulled directly from that article, lets read this together so we can under how extremely irresponsible this ‘advice’ is. First of all this article follows a very popular misconception about car insurance companies. That misconception is actually a tactic used by the insurance companies, and that tactic is fear. Car insurance companies have us in fear of contacting them. Why? It’s a tactic that is used to minimize their payouts, the less people that call them the less money they have to pay out to you. The less people that don’t hire an attorney the less money they payout. What this article doesn’t take into consideration is injuries. What if you could settle the claim easily without involving the insurance companies, should you? Well what if you have an injury from the accident that is not apparent right away? The most common myth about car insurance companies is that by simply calling them puts a mark down on your permanent record and could increase your rates. That is incredibly FALSE. This is their scare tactic that they use to try and get people to not make claims. The article implies that you should ‘…keep you insurance record clean…’ and ‘…it doesn’t matter if the accident is your fault or not…’. So what this article is saying that if the accident is not your fault you should try and not call them so you can keep your record clean. Nothing could be more false than that statement. Here is some basic hard and fast rules when it comes to insurance companies and their rates. This is extremely important to understand:

Insurance companies CANNOT raise your rates unless:

You are at fault for the accident

Or

They raise all of their policy holder rates.

That’s it. Simple. Now doesn’t that go against all of the information presented to you? Most people have the misconception that if you call the insurance companies you rates will go up, and after reading this article full of misinformation I certainly cannot blame people for thinking that. Hopefully this blog will help change all of that and let people know to not be afraid of your own insurance company.