Three insurance horror stories that will leave you scrambling to check your coverage

Back in June, we went on what was undoubtedly our spookiest assignment to date: ghosthunting in the Toronto housing market.

But it's high time we up the ante here at LowestRates.ca. And since our last dip into the depths of darkness already involved real estate, today’s post will center around our next-favourite topic: insurance.

In other words, we’re rounding up insurance horror stories that will be sure to give you goosebumps. The stories we have this time around don’t involve ghosts, or exorcisms, or even a bewildering clown. Instead, they concern more banal terrors — namely, car accidents and financial hardship.

The thing is, a situation doesn’t always have to involve the supernatural to be scary. But living in the world that we do, any scary story we hear will almost always involve money — and maybe a ruthless driver or two.

The hit and run

It was a clear October evening in 2003. Cynthia Baker was driving home to Oshawa on highway 404 when, suddenly, the driver two vehicles ahead of her came to a complete stop to let somebody into the lane. Like dominos, the second vehicle slammed into the first, and Cynthia was pushed into the second vehicle by a van that slammed into her from behind. The four-car pile up was scary enough. But then, the unexpected happened: the van took off.

The hit and run left Cynthia as the last vehicle in line. Because of that, her insurance deemed her at fault for the accident. It didn’t matter that the driver of the first vehicle had no insurance, or that the van had fled the scene. She saw her premiums skyrocket from $800 a year to over $4,000 a year. They stayed like that for six years, gradually declining along the way. It took another four years for the incident to be wiped from her driving record and for her to be eligible for regular insurance rates again.

Cynthia, now 41, had no idea back then that she could have appealed the decision. “I was 26,” she says. “I didn’t know better and neither did anybody in my family. Otherwise, we probably would have fought that determination.”

“She went flying” 

Last May, Lisa Hynek was crossing the street in downtown Toronto when a car made a left into the pedestrian crosswalk, at full speed, and drove right into her.

Witnesses later told Lisa that she went flying across the street — she herself could not recall. What she did know was that the crash gave her over a dozen injuries, and that she didn’t have disability insurance — she had just left a full-time position to do freelance consultancy work. Getting insurance, she said, had been on her to-do list.

Because Lisa needed several months to recover, she was forced to leave her consultancy work  — and the money she would have made from it.

“I had no insurance. I didn’t have income,” she said. “The stress of having to use my savings to pay my bills added unnecessary stress throughout my recovery.”

Nowadays, Lisa is adamant that she never goes without insurance — “even for a day.”

“An accident can happen at any time,” she says.

Peer pressure

Daniela was driving home three years ago in January, in the midst of a snow storm, when her car skidded and went off the road. While luckily no one was hurt, her front bumper crumpled in after colliding with a barrier.

Daniela was initially going to call her insurance company to have her bumper repaired but decided against it after consulting her friends — because of their warnings.

“My friends scared me so much that my insurance was going to go up,” she recalls.

Her rates almost certainly would have gone up. Making a claim and having an insurance company pay for repairs can add hundreds of dollars a month to your car insurance costs.

So, what did Daniela do? She spent the next year driving her car with a crumpled bumper — until she finally caved and decided to fix her car with money out of pocket.