Nice Little Earner?

We were told on Wednesday that the insurance company was not going to repair our car and they would pay us out the book value (less the excess).

They deemed it an economic write-off - not irreparable, but not worth the cost of fixing.

David tried to appeal this on Thursday - we would have happily paid the difference between the book value and the actual cost of repair.

Given that the cheque we received is about 2/3 of the replacement cost, it would have made sense to top up the repair, but the insurance company said they couldn't do this.

So, we went out on Saturday and bought another car; we'd done some searching on Autotrader and found a car that sounded OK, and it seemed potty to hire cars for our needs when we'd got to buy a replacement anyway.

Apparently our type of car is holding it's value well; I don't think that was just spiel from the dealer, as all the other similar cars on Autotrader were around that price, so no bargains for us...

If we'd wanted a similar age Laguna, he'd just sold one for £1700!

But we like economical cars that double-up as vans!

;-)

The only fly in the ointment was the road tax: you cannot tax the car online without the V5, which the dealer (like a law-abiding citizen) had not given to us, but was going to send to the DVLA. You can tax cars at the Post Office without the V5 (if you have proof of purchase), but not on a cover note from the insurers; you need to produce the original document.

I bet you can guess where this is going...

Yup, insurance certificate showed up today (oh we love getting second class postal service even for first class prices!! Blenheim Gardens is pretty much notorious...), around the same time that the car got clamped for not being taxed!!

What a brilliant system...

For the Revenue!

The "system" wouldn't let us tax the vehicle until today, but I'm guessing it's not against the law to sell a vehicle that's not taxed?

We did try (twice) to tax the car before today, but fell foul of the enthusiasm of the local clampers (who have a reputation rather like that of the local sorting office!).

What a shame the "system" doesn't take off the road all those millions of uninsured vehicles that we keep hearing about...

Mind you, the money raised from insurance doesn't go to the government, does it?