Without a reversing camera or distance meter, it can crunch when parking. And already your own fender and that of the car park neighbor are scratched. Removing even small scratches can quickly cost hundreds of Dollars. It’s good that the motor vehicle liability insurance covers the damage to the neighbor and the fully comprehensive insurance covers the damage to your own car.
But every time the car insurance regulates such a claim, you lose part of your so-called no- claims discount.
Up to what amount should you pay the damage yourself?
How much no-claims bonus you lose can be found in the tables in the respective insurance conditions. For example, Huk-Coburg downgrades a driver from the highest damage-free class (SF class) from 35 to 20 after only one damage in liability insurance. Anyone who was previously in SF class 10 ends up in SF class 3 after a liability claim.
This increases the contribution in the following year, and significantly. Until the old discount level is reached again, you have to be accident-free again for years.
In October 2014, Finanztip used the ten most common car brands and the ten largest car insurance companies to calculate the limit up to which it is on average worth paying for damage yourself.
Motor vehicle liability damage – If you cause damage to someone else, you should pay it yourself up to an average of around 1,500 euros.
Fully comprehensive car damage – Paying for damage to your own car yourself is worth up to an average of around 1,300 euros.
On request, your insurer must calculate whether it is worth paying for the damage yourself in your individual case. Alternatively, you can use the Stiftung Warentest calculator. Some insurance companies offer a good service and automatically inform customers when the self-payment is worthwhile. Others, on the other hand, only suggest self-payment up to a flat rate of up to 1,000 euros. As a rule, the insurer makes advance payments and regulates the damage. You then have six months or until the end of the year to consider paying for the damage yourself (“buying back”).
To do this, you have to transfer the money to the insurance company. Various insurers report that the majority of those insured decide against it. However, our advice is very clear: If it is financially possible, you should buy back the damage.
The limit given in the table corresponds to the amount that you will pay more in contributions in the coming years.
Especially in the area between SF class 3 and SF class 13, the contribution rate changes using the example of Huk24 in motor vehicle liability, the contribution rate is reduced by 21 percentage points. Only when you are classified better than SF class 13 do the differences in the contribution rate decrease so much that it is less important in which SF class you are classified.
How can you save your no-claims class?
To avoid the insurance downgrading your no-claims class and making your insurance premium more expensive, there are the following tips.
Pay the damage yourself
As a car owner, you should keep an amount of around 3,000 euros in a call money account. This money should be enough to pay for damages after an accident. For damage to the other party in the accident, you should plan in your mind 1,500 euros, for damage to your car 1,300$. If you have a more expensive car, plan a little more for your comprehensive damage, a little less for a cheap car. You should put this money cushion in addition to your normal reserves.
Very few opponents of the accident agree to have you pay for the damage directly. It is much more common for the injured party to contact your insurance company. But that doesn’t mean that your SF class is automatically ruined. More on this in the next tip.
Buyback your no-claims bonus
If you have had a claim settled by the insurance company and then determine that it would have been cheaper to take care of it yourself, you can buy back a claim from some insurers. This means: You pay the compensation you received back to the provider, and he will reassign you to your previous no-claims class. Depending on the provider, you have this option for up to six or twelve months after you have submitted the claim.
This means that you don’t have to decide immediately after each damage whether you want to pay it yourself. It would be very annoying if you paid the money to the insurance company and had two more accidents in the following time. Then your efforts for your SF class were in vain. You will not get the money back from the insurance company.
Select the Discount Protection option in the contract
But you can also opt for so-called discount protection. He ensures that you have at least one claim per year “free”, that is, that you are not upgraded. However, you tie yourself to your provider. Because if you changed your car insurance, you would be classified as if you had no discount protection.
Nevertheless, we recommend this option. Especially if you still have a single-digit SF class, the downgrading of a loss increases the contribution rate noticeably. For example, Huk24 downgrades from SF class 9 to SF class 2 after damage. Then from January, you will pay 21 percentage points more each year.
But if you have already reached SF class 20, a downgrade will no longer hit you so hard. Then you end up in SF class 9 after the downgrade and pay 13
percentage points more.
That’s how we calculated
In October 2014, in 98 sample cases, we calculated the amount up to which it is worth paying for a claim yourself – in each case for liability and comprehensive insurance. The calculation is based on
- the ten most common car brands (source: GDV),
- the ten largest motor vehicle insurers, measured by the number of contracts (source: Bafin statistics from May 13, 2014),
- the frequency distribution of the no-claims classes across all motor vehicle insurance contracts in the united state (source: GDV)
- as well as the following standard case: male policyholder, born on 1.1.1970, married, one child, employed, mileage 15,000 kilometers per year, garage, only spouse drives, deductible fully comprehensive 300 euros, partially comprehensive 150 euros or only liability insurance.
We also used the calculation with the Stiftung Warentest tool, which calculates the downgrading in the event of damage and the financial disadvantage up to no-claims class 35. The result is exactly 1,531 euros in the case of liability claims and 1,308 euros in the fully comprehensive case, which we have rounded to 1,500 and 1,300 euros as a rule of thumb based on the model assumptions.
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