An Umpire Settled the $7,345 Gap Between Me and American Family

Who decides what your vehicle is worth when you and your insurance company are thousands of dollars apart?

I found myself asking that question after American Family declared my 2018 Ram 2500 a total loss and valued it at $22,504.

I believed my truck was worth more, but there was something in my insurance policy that gave me an opportunity to do more than simply argue about it: the Right to Appraisal. I hired a public adjuster and invoked the appraisal clause, but my story didn't end there.

My appraiser and the appraiser representing American Family reviewed the value of my truck and couldn't come to an agreement. Under the appraisal process, when the two appraisers reach an impasse, the dispute can move to a neutral third party called an umpire.

That's exactly what happened in my claim.

The umpire wasn't there to represent me or American Family. Their job was to review the disagreement and help bring the valuation dispute to a conclusion.

After that review, the value of my Ram was determined to be $29,849. American Family had originally valued it at $22,504. The difference was $7,345.

That number is important, but what stuck with me even more was seeing why the appraisal process exists in the first place. Sometimes two sides genuinely don't agree. Even after each side has its own professional evaluate the loss, they can still arrive at very different conclusions. There needs to be a way to break that stalemate without leaving the insurance company as the only one with the final say.

In my case, there was.

Without the Right to Appraisal, I could have walked away $7,345 short simply because American Family and I disagreed about what my truck was worth.

Instead, my policy provided a process that allowed the disagreement to go beyond both sides and ultimately be decided with the involvement of a neutral third party.

That's what the Right to Appraisal meant to me. It wasn't a guarantee that someone would agree with me. It was a guarantee that I had a way to be heard when we couldn't agree.