My Personal Finance Blog

I was driving to a town about 15 miles from our house and my wife’s office to meet her for dinner last night. Most of the trip is on a rural two-lane highway where traffic typically moves along at 65-70 mph. A deer decided it could make the crossing between an oncoming car and myself and misjudged… Normally I would have swerved behind the deer into the opposite lane to avoid it but the oncoming car made this impossible. I swerved instead to the shoulder but the deer kept on coming and I hit it at approximately 65 mph.

The driver’s side front of our 2004 F-150 impacted the deer’s head and shoulder. The deer must have been spun around because it impacted the driver’s side front and rear doors and well as the rear fender of the truck. There is also damage to the grill, radiator and bumper. I am very happy that I was in the F-150 because from my perspective it was nothing more than a dull “thud”, no air bag deployment or anything.

After pulling to the side of the road and tucking the fog light back into the grill I went back to look for the deer but didn’t see it in the dark. I finished the drive to meet my wife, had a somewhat somber dinner and headed back home. As I approached the scene of the accident I spotted the deer on the side of the road and pulled over. My wife and I loaded it up into the back of the truck and took it home. It was a buck that had just lost his antlers and weighed in at 200 lbs by my estimate. After we got home I called a friend of mine who is a hunter and he came and picked up the deer. He’ll butcher it for us and we’ll share the meat, so we’ll get probably 40-50 pounds of venison out of the deal, assuming there wasn’t much internal damage. Given the $1,000 deductible on our insurance this makes it about $20-25 a pound. Not a cheap way to eat…

Took the truck into the body shop today, he estimates $3,000+ in damage so I called the insurance company to send out an adjuster to the shop to validate the quote and get things moving. The good news is that this is a comprehensive claim and won’t impact our rates in the future. I left the truck at the body shop and drove home with my wife. We’ve got rental coverage too so I’ll probably get a rental car as the truck won’t be back until the first week of January.

I’m just thankful that it was me hitting the poor thing in the truck rather than my wife in our 2004 Subaru. That would have been a far worse collision and would likely have caused some serious injuries. I imagine my driving style will be much more paranoid for a while.