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If you work for an employer, just documenting your hourly wage and/or the days you were incapacitated will be sufficient for a success loss of wages claim.
The insurance company usually will send you a medical authorization form (to check who your current medical providers are) and a employment authorization form (a from where you give express consent to have the insurance company contact the employer and give detail information about their employment and/or compensation rate.
This is one of the reasons why I express that you ask for a medical authorization form, it tends to make things much easier for you. Once you have a doctor saying that you should not go to work, an insurance adjuster will not have many grounds to not pay for the loss of wages claim. If you do not have a doctor’s note, then you could face some difficulties.
Get a great Bodily Injury E-book for more key information about how to recover all your wage loss.
Adjusters are known for wanting to short change you everywhere they can have a boss breathing down their necks telling to settle as low as possible. Many times you simply do not want to hassle your boss by having to answer call form a random adjuster asking for you pay rate. Insurance adjusters like to use that to discourage your from making a claim.
Remember that your boss has a duty to you.
What happens if you were in vacation? Does the loss of wages claim still exists?
This is an interesting question. The objective of insurance (and tort law for that matter) is to place the injured party back in the position they would have been if the accident never occurred. It is impossible to this, however, the insurance company must do the best they can to get you as close as they can to that pre accident point.
So if you are in vacation, was there any loss of wages? The answer is of course no, and many insurance companies would deny the claim based on that theory. Courts luckily have changed that! If you are injured and you are taking your vacation time, you would not be able to enjoy your vacation they way you planned (with back and neck pain).
The courts have agreed that insurance company should pay for the days that you could not the normal activities you were planning to do in vacation at the rate you would have been paid if you were at work.
If you receive double payment (one because you are in a paid vacation and two from the insurance company in your loss of wages claim) then you will get a windfall. It does not matter. You have now lost your vacation time (your employer will not give you another paid week to go to Disneyland because you had an accident).
These are the most complicated form of wage loss claims. Really, this can become the biggest headache of the entire claim, forget about pain and suffering, and the total loss of the car; loss wages can be very hard to prove under this circumstances.
The reason for this is because you do not have a boss that can verify your income. I know this is unfair, but the insurance company will not just take your word for it. It is hard to calculate income, a Realtor that does not sell a house could claim that his entire commission was lost due to the car accident; consequently claims adjusters will quickly point out that normally a house takes time to sell and that normally it takes 30 days to close the deal.
The will be trying to show that the accident did not cause the loss of the commission. Under most circumstances the insurance company will prevail with this argument.
The independent contractor and the self employed have similar difficulties. Did they lose a job in which they would have made $3,000 because of the accident? Or was it for any other reason? A deal most of the time is not completely lost because of one miss appointment.
A similar circumstance occurs with on going projects. Was the contractor unable to finish the work because of the injury? if the answer is yes, and the contractor can show by preponderance that the injury cause the delay on the work. But the fight would not be over there, the insurance company will seek protection under the legal concept of mitigation of damages. What did the contractor do so that the delay on the contract was not significant? Why did she/he not hire someone to finish the job on time? Believe or not the law will put an affirmative duty on you to make sure your responsibilities are fulfilled so you avoid waste (protect the person that hit you).
So the insurance company will make you document all loss of wages and if you do not have documentation, then they will not pay you. If you can prove that you had loss of wages, then they will question if you mitigated your damages so they can deduct even more.
If you cannot possible provide documentation of your projected income or your actual loss, you could show your federal income tax return. Only show the pages that are relevant, you do not want them to see things you do not want the to see.
This way you could add what you made in a year and divided by the amount of workable days (not 365 days since you did not work every single day the prior year). This will give you the average income per day and give you a rough estimate of your income per day.
If the prior year was not a good year (say you had slow sales), the provide three or five years of federal income tax data. Show them that you made more than they are willing to offer you.
The limitations are rather severe in loss of wages claims. If you are making a claim against your own insurance company, then you will be subject to a very low limit ($40 dollars per day) or you will be compensated at $8 every $10.
If you are making a claim for loss of wages against someone else’s insurance company, then no limits would apply (only the limits of liability that person purchased on the policy).
However, there is one more caveat. The wage loss must be related to the injury in other words, if you had a car that was a total loss and you had to spend days finding a car (away from your work place), this would not be valid wage loss claim (at least on the eyes of the claim adjuster), they will only pay if you physically could not work.
Again, remember, the fact that the insurance company did not want to pay for loss wages because they were related to a car accident does not mean that you cannot successfully claim this in a court of law.
read more about loss of wages in your personal Injury Protection coverage.
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