Watch Short term Car Insurance Make An Old Man Cry.

Okay, I may have exaggerated a bit, but it did make him very, very sad. You see, my Dad is a car guy. He's the type of person who can tell what year a model was made by looking at the rear fender. I've seen him take apart a 30 year old engine in an afternoon. I can barely put gas in the car without screwing something up, but that's not really important to the story.

Anyway, a while back my father had purchased an old, beat-up 1967 Mustang convertible. It was his retirement project and he worked on that car every day for two years. It seemed like a ton of work to me, but he'd never been happier. My mother joked that he should have gotten a mistress; it would have been cheaper and less time-consuming. At least I think she was joking. Finally though, he finished restoring it and, even though I can't tell a Mustang from a water buffalo, it looked incredible. He even had a custom paint job done – cherry red, naturally.

Even though the car was finished, he still had to wait for the tags and a new side mirror before he could take it out on the street. And since he and mom were leaving for Florida for the winter, he decided to wait until they came back before registering it with his insurance company. Mom suggested he take out a short term car insurance policy for the next few months until they got back, just in case something happened while they were away. Dad figured, what could happen to it sitting in the garage for three months? Besides, that money could be better spent in the clubhouse of the golf course or at the pool bar. I think you can see where this is heading...

When they got home the first thing dad did was go into the garage to check on the car. When mom heard the scream, she thought he was having a heart attack or something and ran to the rescue. She found dad staring speechless at a 1967 Mustang covered in blue paint with a crushed windshield. Apparently, a light fixture in the garage had come loose at some point in the winter, crashing into some shelves and sending three full cans of paint down onto the hood and windshield. My father was not pleased. Mom was annoyed, in that she knew this meant a few additional months of sharing her husband with a car. However, the wonderful joy of “I told you so” more than made up for it. The short term car insurance policy would have completely covered any damages experienced while in storage, and for a fraction of the price my father wound up paying for the repairs.

To this day we still tease dad about the dangers of his garage. He's working on a new car now, an old Impala I think. But now when he heads to Florida, he's got a short term insurance policy for the hunk of junk under the sheet in his garage.