Our dream car is our antique 1952 Chevy deluxe. It is just like the car that Brent owned when he was 18 and and sold at 19 to go on his mission. We bought our "new dream car" 16 years ago, when Brent found it parked outside his work and for sale. Seemed like a little gift that was returned to us. We loved it because it was a great car and looked just like his original and because of the memories it held for us.
Two years ago, it was stolen from the driveway in front of our house in the middle of the night.Because we didn't understand how to insure antique antique cars and never specifically told our insurance to raise the coverage, State Farm, payed us a fraction of what it was worth and required us to sign it over to them if we wanted any payout at all for the car.
Two years later (last month) through the great police work of Phoenix PD, our car was recovered. We, and the police, have positively identified it through lots of
pictures we'd taken and the vin number. Can you imagine our joy and surprise!! We were thrilled and so were the hard working police officers until we talked to State Farm Insurance.
The problem was that State Farm Insurance refuses to sell our car back to us in return for the money they had given us and any handling fees they may have incurred.
They said it was just their policy never to give cars back to people who have them stolen.
We pursued this with every level of the company and eventually found somebody who would at least talk to us and we have been talking for a month.
Now, after working for a month with State Farm, they have agreed to a "private auction" with us to get our car back. Again they raised our hopes to get our dream car back. Again we fear that they are going to dash those hopes.
This is why. They told us this week that they are planning to do an "auction" for the car first, where others bid on it, but can't really buy it. Then they will sell it back to us at the price of the highest bid, which I'm sure will be well over the payout they gave us when the car was stolen and most likely out of our reach.
Somehow this doesn't seem fair at all. We paid insurance premiums and then because we took a payout, which they forced us to do if we wanted anything for our loss. , we now are in a terrible position to have very little chance to get the car back. We can't think of anything that would cause them to be this way except that State Farm seems only concerned about getting all the money they can out of our car. Certainly they are not representing our interests or acting in good faith to us, as their clients
We feel like the thief robbed us once and State Farm is trying to rob us twice.
Our dream car story has turned into a nightmare and we don't know what we can do about it. We also don't want anybody else to have this terrible experience. I guess that the only thing we could have done to prevent this problem is not ask the insurance to pay us when the car was stolen. That didn't make much sense to us since we had paid premiums for 16 years to them. We are just caught by the insurance company in an impossible situation. Pretty lame, huh!?!?
So, we only have pictures of our dream car and the hope that somebody, somewhere will come to their senses and make this right.
Keep a good thought for us and "Old Blue"!! We're not done yet!!
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We received a mission call today. It's a pretty long story that began right after Dad died in Jan. Brent and I felt a great urgency to look at the possibility of a mission and began to work on going. We first contacted the mission president in Geneva who we met two years ago. He had told us that when we put in mission papers, we should contact him. He said that he had a 90% chance of getting a couple to his mission if he requested them. So, we contacted him. He told us that he needed a senior couple in Lyon, France for the Institute outreach program. Quite a stretch for me to learn French, but sounded good. It looked like something just right for us. So, we sent in our papers with our request, his request and letters from our Bishop and Stake Pres. to go to Geneva. I started studying French seriously. The other thing that I forgot to tell you was that the mission Pres. told us was that "if the Lord had other plans" then we would be part of the 10% who didn't get the call to that mission.So, we should be prepared for that. Well, we weren't.
