Pay Less For Your Car Insurance . . .
Don't drive yourself to the poor house. Higher insurance premiums don't guarantee better service from their provider.
While cheaper may not be better when it comes to razor blades or toilet paper, paying less for your car insurance is certainly not as painful.
You may have seen the Grey Power commercial (recently retired) with the catch phrase, “You don't drive like her, so why are you paying the same rate as her?”
This commercial hits the dead center of your logic sensor. You shouldn't pay as much as a bad driver, if you're a good driver. Yet, many do – and few drivers pay the best rate available to them.
So are such ads painfully obvious? Are their rates the lowest? Is their coverage better? Do they offer superior claim's service?
Here are some things to remember.
1) There is no single insurance company that offers the lowest rate for every driver.
Each insurer company targets its best rates to the type of driver's profile that they want to insure. Some advertise who they want, such as “50 plus,” while others don't. The companies that don't advertise may or may not have better rates than the ones that do advertise.
Ultimately, it's up to the driver to find out who has the lowest rate. You can call around to get quotes, yet that can be time-consuming. Further, brokers can only quote you from the insurance companies they represent, while agents or direct writers can only quote you from one company's rates.
Your best alternative is to find an online comparison guide that quotes from a number of insurance company rates at once.
On my old TV show, David Onley, now the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario, once told me that if he were to move across the street, causing his postal code to change, his insurance rate would go down by hundreds of dollars. The problem is there are so many factors involved, like postal codes, vehicle types, driving experience, age, insurance company loss experience, rates differ wildly
To demonstrate these rate differences, the Financial Services Commission of Ontario compared 60 insurance company rates for four separate driving profiles. This shows how insurance companies and their rates can shuffle when quoting different driving profiles, and the huge spread of rates that exist for the exact same driver's profile.
For example, if you were insuring two cars and drivers with clean records in Toronto, rates came in as low as $3,023, to over $7,500 dollars. These comparisons can be viewed in full at http://www.incomeactivator.com/users/content/www.RomanovReport.com.
2) No one insurance company has better coverage or policy than another.
Insurance policies are identical, word for word, within each province. The reason for this is that they're regulated by each provincial government. In short, liability insurance is mandatory. The normal limit is $1-million and covers you for accident benefits, uninsured automobile and direct compensation property damage.
Briefly stated, accident benefits provide protection to those injured or killed as a result of a motor vehicle accident. Uninsured automobile provides coverage for bodily injury or death, if you're hit by an uninsured motorist, or an unidentified automobile. Direct compensation property damage covers the cost of repairs to your car after an accident where you were found to be not at fault.
You can also get optional coverage, such as collision and comprehensive coverage, which you don't need to include if you're trying to save money. Collision coverage covers repairs to your automobile after a collision with such things as another vehicle, or a tree. Comprehensive coverage pays for damage from things such as fire, theft, lightning, windstorm, hail, and water damage.
3) Paying a lower insurance rate does not mean you'll have a bad claims experience.
If you have an accident, it's not like the insurance adjuster is going to look up how much you paid to decide how to treat you. All standard insurance companies work from the same fault determination rules, and many use outside claims adjusters.
Essentially, you'll never know if you're going to have a claims problem until you have it, regardless which company you're with, or how much you paid.
So don't drive yourself to the poor house. Over all, drivers who pay hundreds of dollars more do not receive extra value for their insurance dollar.
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