I can’t tell you enough how good it felt when I paid for my most recent car insurance bill. I have to admit though, $575 is hard to give out, but at least I know it’s the best rate I could pay for.
I’d rather that than figuring out if we’re getting overcharged.
What’s even better with our new insurer is this second bill didn’t charge us a higher cost — not even a cent.
We had to look for another car insurance company last year since our past insurer kept charging us twice the amount per six months, for a few years.
My only regret now is not getting insured by a new company earlier.
Surprisingly, finding a new insurer was easier and less hassle than what I expected. By the time we finished, we realized we spared ourselves $263 a year. That’s around 19% annually.
All we did was search for it online. These two steps pretty much sum up how we did it after that.
1. I compared quotes from the insurers I looked up
Finding a cheaper and more trustworthy car insurer started by asking quotes from two different companies. I then made sure to compare them with the cost of renewing with our past insurer.
To keep the process basic, we made sure to stick with finding only two insurers. We had to look through each of the companies’ websites to get an overview.
Of course, we had to share some personal information to see what discounts they offered. It took us around 10 minutes since we were very particular about their policy options. We just had to be sure with how much they will charge.
Each of the companies gave us a lower premium quote compared to our previous insurer. Best thing to do is switch to either of the two choices.
After finally deciding to make the switch, we then proceeded to reviewing and editing our policy options.
2. I made a few adjustments to the deductible
When we were just starting out on our policy options, I recommended this article to my husband: The Complete Guide to Getting the Best Possible Deal on Car Insurance.
It was written by no other than the founder of Money Talks, Stacy Johnson. It is the most helpful read I could find about dealing with each line that’s in your insurance policy.
He pointed out how increasing the deductibles on your car insurance can actually reduce the cost of your premiums. This is exactly what I wanted to be done with my policy.
When I found out about this, it made me weary to pay a premium without increasing our deductibles of $250 and $500. My husband used to be an auditor, and it wore me out whenever he would reject this suggestion with his “what ifs.”
So, I stood my ground, and told him to think about it this way:
“Accidents happening are possible, but having a premium will always be certain. Would we rather pay a considerably larger amount of money per six months just thinking an accident could happen any moment?”
Now, all our deductibles are at $1,000.
Some of our policy’s aspects that we kept as is include:
- Uninsured motorist: We decided to keep this coverage since we reside in a state that has the larger percentage of uninsured drivers, based on the Insurance Information Institute.
- Personal injury protection: Our maximum coverage for this had to be $10,000 only since this is the required minimum amount in the state. We took this advice from the same article by Stacy.
- Comprehensive and collision: We’ve had our car for 9 years, so we were considering opting this coverage out. In the end we stayed with it after computing, applying what Stacy explained about using the 10 percent rule of thumb.
- Payment frequency: We decided we would rather pay our bill in full per six months instead of doing the payments on a monthly basis. Our company gave us a break on this just as other companies would.
Conclusion
While this may seem more of a personal story, the lesson about this is generally applicable: Saving money by finding a car insurance doesn’t have to be difficult or a hassle.
In fact, you can save yourself the trouble of doing the first step by using free services such as The Zebra and Gabi. They will gather the quotes for you and summarize it into a report on the rates each insurer might offer.
You could be well off with paying your current rates, but it would be good to take a look at comparisons each one or two years. You just might be surprised how much you could save by looking around.
Stacy told his readers, he usually does his shopping for car and home insurance in a year, and his life and health insurance during the following year. So, he makes it a habit to check each hid policies every other year.
In over three years, it’s been the first time since we last looked for car insurance. Compared to Stacy, we were long overdue.
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