Have You Looked at Your Car Insurance Premiums Lately?

Insurance agents are like subprime mortgage lenders.  Their incentive is based on selling you more insurance, not necessarily the right insurance for you and your family.

So it pays to educate yourself on what your personal needs are.

By understanding:

1. your home state’s minimum requirements, and
2. what you and your family need to be protected,

you can eliminate the chance of over-zealous insurance agents selling you more insurance than you really need.

How much auto insurance do you need?  Your needs will change.  Re-evaluate your policy yearly.  Ask yourself questions like:

• how old are your cars?  At some point your car is so old that collision doesn’t pay enough to cover its cost.
• can you consolidate policies?  It’ll be more expensive for you and your spouse to have separate policies than a joint one.
• is the company you’re currently using responsive?  Some companies provide great service.  Some do not.

If your confused about where to start, Consumer Reports offers this approach:

Start at the Web site of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, and click on NAIC States & Jurisdictions to find your state’s insurance department. Most provide comparative premium quotes based on standard customer profiles. If your state doesn’t, you can get quotes from insurers by phone or over the Internet. You can also compare premiums from multiple carriers by using independent Web sites, such as Insweb, Insurance.com, and Insure.com. 

My personal experience:

This spring, my home state of Massachusetts deregulated the auto insurance industry.  Formerly, no matter where you bought insurance, you paid a standard assigned price.  In other words, they could oversell you, but they couldn’t over charge you.

Now, auto insurance prices are unregulated.  Sound familiar?  Having a PTSD attack?  That’s right, insurers can charge whatever they wish.  According to a plethora of advertisements by the auto insurance industry, this was supposed to make my car insurance go down.

But when I started shopping around, I noticed the prices I was being quoted were actually higher than what I was currently paying.  This was even with my spouse and I consolidating our policies.  All this, while huge advertisements kept telling me it would be the opposite.

Go figure.  I guess here in Massachusetts, they still haven’t learned anything about the evils of deregulation.  Or maybe they have.

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