Tuesday, March 13, 2012

15 Minutes Could Save You 15% or More on Car Insurance

Those car insurance commercials are super annoying.  I want to not have car insurance just because of them.

Realistically, that is not possible.  And I was happy with our current car insurance company (Travelers) until Monday.  I have them take out our premium automatically each month and I noticed that this month's amount was about $15 more than usual.  I called them to make sure we hadn't done something that made our insurance premium go up. This is a summary of how our conversation went:

Me: Hi- I was wondering why our premium went up. We have not had any accidents and no speeding tickets.  Could you help me?
Lady on the other end: Sure.  Let me look.... {On hold for about a thousand hours}.  Ok, it looks like you had a premium increase.
Me: {Thinking No, really?? Duh.} Why would it have gone up?
Lady: Well, the premiums are based on your zip code. So when it was time for the premium checks in December, yours went up because of the accidents in your zip code.
Me: So I am paying for other peoples' car accidents??
Lady: Look at it this way: The price of groceries have gone up.  Gas is more expensive.  Its kind of like that.

Not so much.  The lady didn't know she was talking to the Comp Queen.

I promptly requested and received 4 quotes from 4 different companies.  One was much higher (double our newly increased premium), one was the same, one was a few dollars lower.  Then I hit the jackpot: Approximately $40 lower.  Per month.  For the same amount of coverage.

I guess the moral to the story is although those commercials make you want to shove a gecko into Flo's mouth to shut her up, it might be worth your time to shop around.   Although it didn't take me 15 minutes, it did only take a few hours for all the quotes which I requested online. I will save around $480/year now.

That means I need an Ipad now.  You know.  Just because.

P.S.  The cheapest quote I got was indeed from Geico.  And I purchased it online- it was super easy.


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