12 February 2026
Yesterday, something happened that I have been waiting for since November.
The financial side of the theft of my car is finally coming to an end.
The insurance payment has been made, the finance company has received the insurance money, and the process has finally reached the point where the money is effectively settled and available.
It should feel like a victory.
Instead, it mostly feels like relief.
And exhaustion.
From 13 November to 11 February
My Peugeot 5008 was stolen in Berlin during the night of 12 to 13 November 2025.
Today is 12 February 2026.
That means almost exactly three months have passed.
Three months between waking up and discovering that my car had disappeared and finally reaching the financial conclusion of something that I never asked to happen in the first place.
When I wrote about the theft one week after it happened, I was still processing the emotional side of it.
The disbelief.
The anger.
The disappointment.
The strange feeling of looking at an empty parking space where my car was supposed to be.
At that point, I was still thinking mostly about the theft itself.
I had no idea just how long the administrative aftermath would become.
Stealing a Car Takes Minutes. Resolving It Takes Months.
There is something deeply ironic about the entire process.
I don't know how long it took someone to steal my Peugeot.
Perhaps ten minutes.
Perhaps five.
Perhaps less.
But the consequences have occupied almost three months of my life.
Police reports.
Insurance notifications.
Emails.
Telephone calls.
Questionnaires.
Original documents.
Vehicle documentation.
Keys.
Finance company correspondence.
Requests for additional information.
More emails.
More documents.
Waiting.
Following up.
Waiting again.
At one point I found myself dealing simultaneously with the police, EUROPA Versicherung, Stellantis Financial Services and other parties simply because somebody else had decided to take my property.
That is perhaps the strangest part of becoming the victim of a crime.
The criminal creates the problem.
The victim inherits the project.
November
The car disappeared on 13 November.
The police were informed.
The insurance company was informed.
The financing company was informed.
The claim process began.
I assumed — perhaps somewhat naively — that the basic sequence would be straightforward.
The car was stolen.
There was a police report.
The vehicle was insured against theft.
The insurer would investigate the claim.
The insurer would pay.
Finished.
Conceptually, that is exactly what happens.
Operationally, however, there is an enormous amount between those sentences.
By the second half of November, I was dealing with questionnaires and requests for original documentation.
There were questions about the vehicle.
Questions about the circumstances.
Questions about the keys.
Questions about documentation.
There were documents that had to be located, other documents that had to be obtained, and communications between organisations that did not necessarily move at the speed I would have hoped.
The Peugeot was gone.
But administratively, it was very much still part of my life.
December
Then November became December.
Still no car.
Still no final settlement.
The police had not recovered the vehicle.
The insurance process continued.
Additional documentation was required.
Some documents depended on other organisations.
Some things had to be sent physically.
Some information had to be clarified.
There was correspondence with the police.
Correspondence with the insurer.
Correspondence with Stellantis.
Correspondence with the dealership.
And there was an important complication: the car was financed.
At the time, there was still approximately €6,600 outstanding on the vehicle financing.
That meant this could not simply be a case of an insurance company transferring money directly to me and everybody going home.
The financing had to be resolved as part of the insurance settlement.
Again: completely understandable from a contractual perspective.
But every additional organisation means another process.
Another queue.
Another set of procedures.
Another opportunity to wait.
January
Then Christmas passed.
New Year passed.
It was 2026.
My car had been stolen in 2025.
And the process was still alive.
By this stage, the emotional character of the situation had changed.
Immediately after the theft, I was angry.
A few weeks later, I was frustrated.
After a couple of months, I was simply tired of it.
That is an important distinction.
There comes a point in a bureaucratic process where you no longer want explanations.
You no longer want status updates.
You no longer want another reference number.
You simply want the matter closed.
I did not want to spend another morning thinking about a Peugeot 5008 that had disappeared months earlier.
I wanted the theft to become history.
And Finally, February
Yesterday, 11 February 2026, I received the confirmation I had been waiting for.
Stellantis Financial Services confirmed that they had received the insurance payment.
They could now proceed with the final settlement of the financing.
After almost three months, the financial chain triggered by the theft had finally reached its destination.
The insurance had paid.
The outstanding financing could be closed.
The financial side could finally be reconciled.
The money was no longer an expectation somewhere inside an insurance claim.
It was real.
Settled.
Available.
Done.
That word — done — feels remarkably good.
Almost Three Months
It is worth putting the dates next to each other:
13 November 2025: My car is stolen.
11 February 2026: Confirmation that the insurance payment has finally reached the finance company and the final financial settlement can proceed.
That is approximately 90 days.
Three months.
A quarter of a year.
I understand why insurance companies investigate vehicle theft.
They should.
A stolen vehicle is a significant financial claim. Insurers have obligations to verify the circumstances, establish ownership, examine documentation and protect themselves and their customers against fraud.
I also understand why a financed vehicle complicates matters.
The financing company has a legitimate financial interest in the car.
None of that is unreasonable.
But understanding a process does not make waiting three months pleasant.
Especially when you are the victim.
Insurance Is Something You Buy Hoping Never to Understand
There is an interesting lesson here.
Most of us buy insurance without really knowing how insurance works when something serious actually happens.
We know the theory.
You pay a premium.
Something bad happens.
You make a claim.
The insurer compensates you.
That is the simplified version.
The real version contains considerably more verbs:
Report.
Document.
Prove.
Explain.
Sign.
Send.
Wait.
Clarify.
Resend.
Follow up.
Wait.
Confirm.
Settle.
And eventually, hopefully:
Receive.
I now understand the process considerably better than I did on 12 November.
I would have preferred to remain ignorant.
Does the Money Make Everything Fine?
No.
This is something I want to make very clear.
Insurance compensates financial loss.
It cannot reverse an experience.
The money does not change the morning when I discovered the car was missing.
It does not erase the feeling of violation.
It does not restore the time spent dealing with police reports, insurance documentation and financing paperwork.
It does not change the disappointment I felt — and still feel — about having something like this happen to me in Germany.
The purpose of insurance is not to make history disappear.
It is to prevent a bad event from becoming a financial catastrophe.
And in that respect, eventually, the system worked.
That deserves to be acknowledged.
Credit Where It Is Due
I was extremely frustrated by the length of this process.
But there is an important distinction between saying the process took too long and saying the process failed.
It did not fail.
EUROPA ultimately honoured the insurance claim.
The payment was made.
Stellantis Financial Services confirmed receipt.
The outstanding financing can be settled.
Financially, the mechanism that I had paid insurance premiums for did what it was supposed to do.
It simply took far longer than I would ever have imagined when I stood looking at that empty parking space in November.
I think it is fair to criticise the duration while still recognising the outcome.
What Remains
The car remains gone.
Perhaps somewhere there is still a Peugeot 5008 that once belonged to me.
Perhaps it was exported.
Perhaps dismantled.
Perhaps transformed into parts.
I may never know.
For months, that uncertainty bothered me.
Now, strangely, it matters less.
There comes a moment when you have to separate yourself from an object that is no longer part of your life.
For me, receiving the financial settlement represents that moment.
The car is no longer my missing car.
It is now simply the car that was stolen from me in November 2025.
That small grammatical difference represents something significant.
One is an ongoing problem.
The other is history.
Closing the File
When this started, I was angry about Germany.
I was disappointed.
I wrote about how strange it felt that after decades of owning cars in different parts of the world, the first time somebody stole one of them happened here.
In Berlin.
In Germany.
A country I associated with order, security and predictability.
Three months later, I still feel some of that disappointment.
But today the dominant feeling is different.
Today I am relieved.
The police investigation may exist in whatever form it now takes.
The stolen car may never be recovered.
But the part of this story that required my constant involvement is finally reaching its end.
No more wondering when the insurance company will pay.
No more wondering how the finance agreement will be resolved.
No more carrying an unresolved stolen car around as another item on my mental list.
After almost three months, I can finally close this chapter.
Not happily.
Not triumphantly.
Just gratefully.
Sometimes closure does not arrive when the thing you lost comes back.
Sometimes closure is simply the moment when you realise that there is finally nothing left for you to do.
And after 90 days, that is more than enough.
This article is based on my original ideas, experience, analysis and conclusions. Artificial intelligence tools were subsequently used as editorial and research assistants to review grammar and wording, improve structure and presentation, organise some arguments into clearer logical sections, and help review references to legal, regulatory and technical concepts.
Where relevant, factual and regulatory references were checked against the sources cited in the article. AI assistance does not replace professional legal, regulatory, financial or technical advice, and the final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.
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