Have You Shopped Your Insurance?
My wife and I do financial counseling at our church. Our church offers financial counseling for free and the program is headed up by Joe Sangl, who has become somewhat of a celebrity in these parts. In these sessions we help people set up a budget and look at places where they may be overspending. One of the biggest areas is Insurance. Most people set up their insurance and never look back. They don’t check to make sure that they are getting the best deal and the thought that an insurance sales person doesn’t necessarily have their best interests in mind doesn’t come up. So we always recommend shopping your insurance at least once every two years. You see insurance is a very competitive industry. So rates, by nature, will drop over time. Now this does not include extenuating circumstances like living in a hurricane zone. However, just the threat that you look elsewhere on a regular basis lets your agent know that you mean business and are not to be trifled with.
That being said I just started my own insurance review. I have had auto insurance with State Farm since I was sixteen. I now have two cars, home owners, and a small policy for my wife’s ring. As soon as I am done with my weight loss I will be getting new quotes on my life insurance. I learned about a new company called Horace Mann. They are an insurance company set up specifically for educators. I had them run a set of quotes and their auto was almost as inexpensive as my State Farm. Now let me clarify, State Farm has always won on my auto because of the loyalty discounts I get for having been a customer with zero claims for 14 years. My newest insurance is my homeowners. This came out to be $300 per year less with Horace Mann. I even made sure the coverage was comparable. This really confused me so I went online and got another quote for homeowners and it was similar to the previous one. This means they snookered me for $300 or $25 per month. I could have been putting that toward the principle on my mortgage. So even with the experience I have had with insurance companies I still got ripped on the newest of my insurance policies. Be sure that this will be corrected and make sure the same thing isn’t happening to you. If you are looking for quotes just find and independent insurance agent in your area. These people are not held to any one company and can search quotes from multiple sources. Happy Hunting!!
February 5th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
We were able to save alot of money (over $500) by paying our car insurance premiums once a year instead of every six months. Not every company out there will allow this, but some will. Our insurance company we had been using (Nationwide) did not provide this service so we switched. It was funny the guy at the agency (Nationwide) told us that was illegal (since my husband works for the Department of Insurance he knew it wasn’t illegal) because he didn’t want to lose our business.
When we did this, Nationwide immediately took away our multipolicy discount and upped our homeowners insurance $300. So we shopped it again and found that the new company would provide it to us for less than we were originally paying with Nationwide.
We are now paying less for 2 cars and a house than we were paying for the 2 cars for a year!
My mom had never looked at what she was paying for on her tax bill. 30 years ago my grandmother put a trailer on mom & dad’s property. We sold it in 1987. It had never been removed from her tax bill. She had been paying property taxes on it for 17 years when I looked at her tax bill and found it. So that is another place to look for savings.
February 13th, 2008 at 10:02 pm
Keep in mind that insurance isn’t a commodity so there’s more to consider than price alone. There are some very bad operators out there (like State Farm), so saving a few bucks may buy you more headaches than its worth.