More Reasons Why You Should Have Comprehensive Car Insurance

I was scrolling through my Facebook timeline the other day when I saw a picture with the caption, “your car is parked in your premises, rain fell and your neighbour’s fence fell and damaged the car, who will bear the consequences, the neighbour or the car owner?” This, by the way, adds to more reasons why you should have comprehensive car insurance.

The first thing that came to my mind was that the fence technically belongs to the two of you. The second, is that most people that would face these circumstances would probably be tenants. As such, they won’t have much recourse. The landlord would leave them to their own fate.

I immediately flashed back to when I was leaving in a mini flat off Adeniran Ogunsanya. I was the first tenant into the flat as it was a brand new building. Unfortunately, the landlord tried to cut cost by any means necessary.

Hence, the sinks in the kitchen and bathrooms were leaking, and when it rained the roof leaked too. It turned out that the landlord used inferior wiring in the house. As a result, the house caught fire in the middle of the night while I was sleeping. This happened less than six months of living there after paying for two (2) years upfront.

Luckily for me, it happened at about 5am in the morning as a man on the way to work saw the living room burning while I was sleeping in the bedroom. The person started throwing stones at my window which eventually broke the window and woke the landlord. Subsequently, the landlord came and started banging on my door and woke me up. I was able to make it out of the bedroom, fought through the smoke, and escaped through the kitchen. I could have died either from asphyxiation or immolation.

My landlord didn’t care, he told me to go and fix his house and put it back in the state he gave it to me. With 18 months still left on my rent, I had no choice but to fix the house. At the end of the remaining 18 months, I got my lawyer to write him that he owned me one year rent for cost of fixing the house. At the end of the additional year, I moved out.

Living in the house gave me leverage, as the landlord couldn’t easily kick me out. There would have been no leverage to get the landlord to fix my car had his cheaply made fence fallen on it.

In such situation, If you are lucky, the landlord would have the debris removed. Otherwise, it would be left to the tenants to clean up, and a new fence would probably not be erected. You can forget about the landlord paying to fix your car. Which brings me back to the last thought that went through my mind when I read that post on Facebook; doesn’t this count as more reasons why you should have comprehensive car insurance?

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