I received no responses over in the financial section so I thought I'd try here.

Is there any way one can get the insurance company to raise the amount of their proposed settlement? They're offering at least $1,000 below value for our vehicle that was totaled as the result of a house fire (not even our house!). The amount they quoted is $ 1,000-2,000 lower that the retail prices that we've found for our car as well. We've had the same ins. company since we've been driving and have poured a lot of money down their rat hole over the years. The summary they furnished from an outsource company includes cars with more than 50% more mileage than our had and some reference no dealer, etc. I provided back to them screen prints of searches we've done through autotrader.com and cars.com but we haven't heard back yet. Any help would be greatly appreciated. BTW, I've already spoken to the state ins. commish's office and they said to get them involved if we couldn't arrive at a price although they don't have much leverage. Thanks folks!

I was successful several years ago in getting closer to the value of a "totalled" car by canvassing the newspaper ads and local lots to show the LOCAL value of the vehicle, which can vary greatly in a surprisingly short distance. Stick with a 50 to 75 mile radius.

Car dealers proved amazingly willing to help by providing estimates of what the sticker would say if the car were on their lot.

The Better Business Bureau might also be helpful.

Lo and behold - the eleven page FAX that we provided did help to get us some more money! We got them up to the average of Kelley Blue Book and NADA based on all this data. I can't help but wonder what was the max. that they would have been willing to part with though. What a pain in the wazoo! I hope nobody else has to go through this, but if you do - don't take their first offer!

Congratulations!
And yeah, don't take the first offer and NEVER cash the check until it's an offer you're accepting.