Never having been in an accident before, I never had to challenge my auto insurance company with a claim. My experience with Allstate was a very positive one, and I definitely have no intention of shopping around for a different insurer. The check they sent me was more than I expected since they gave me a great value assessment on my former car.
So my first instinct would be to apply this cash to the down payment of my replacement car and end up with a small monthly payment or short term loan (after all, I had just one year left to pay on the car). But Donna had the good sense to think some more about it. We have to make some bathroom repairs, and we'd have to get a loan to fund that remodeling effort. We hadn't yet shopped around for rates on loans, but here the Saturn dealer was offering 0% financing on new car purchases! Hmmm....
We ended up putting a modest down payment on the new car and financing the rest at 0% for 5 years. So we are now free to apply that cash from the claim to our remodeling effort and finance the remainder. In effect, we are getting a 0% loan for a large portion of our bathroom remodeling.
We went to The Great Indoors on Friday and enlisted their services to oversee the remodeling effort. They should be contacting us this week to schedule a project manager to come out and give us an estimate of the labor costs. That is pretty exciting, since it's our first concrete step to actually getting started on the long-overdue bathroom repairs.