Traumatic Tuesday Update

You probably read about Ella's bike Lucy having a run in with the garage door last month. On closer inspection of the car, it became apparent that the roof rack could not go back on the car due to the bent bits on the interior component of the driver and passenger doors. The doors themselves closed perfectly and the dent in the roof was minimal.

Anyway we rely heavily on the bike roof rack so decided to have it assessed to see whether to make a claim on our car insurance. Let me say we had never before made a claim and we were about to get educated!

Now our old car, aka Betsy, was a 2000 Nissan Pulsar, she had seen better days but was perfectly fine for us especially since we are off to the UK in 6 weeks time. We had just renewed our car insurance policy ($600 for the year) where Betsy had dropped $1500 to $3000. So it was extremely unfortunate that the garage incident happened 5 days into our new policy.

Thinking that we would be paying an excess of $600 to have Betsy repaired just so that we could use the roof racks, we were astounded when the assessor rang to tell us that Betsy was too expensive to repair and would be written off!  He explained further that the whole roof panel needed replacing, it would have to come from Japan which would take 6 weeks and following that the whole car would need to be spray painted all costing much more than the car was worth.

The words written off was Betsy's death sentence. From that point in time Betsy was no longer insured (except for 3rd party person). Even if we cancelled the claim, Betsy was branded as written off and still not insured. We had no option but to take the cash (minus the excess of course) and we were instantly without a car!!

Thank goodness for family, we were able to juggle using Nana's car and all of a sudden we were in the market for a new car. Luckily we had already been discussing the options of our next car envisaging to buy one towards the end of the year. These discussion were all pointing towards a small, front wheel drive SUV.

One saturday afternoon we left the girls with Nana and did a lap of the car yards at Belconnen. Our list quickly whittled down to Mazda CX5 and VW Tiguan. An annual leave day in the following week saw us test drive both as well as negotiate the best deal.

Introducing Loopsy, aptly named by the girls, the Mazda CX5 who we picked up today!