Auto Insurance Rate — Ways To Get Cheaper
May 28th, 2009 | by Chimezirim Odimba |Paying your premium yearly will result in more affordable rates than choosing monthly payments. Notwithstanding the fact that this option is often less stressful, it is more expensive for some reasons..
There are transaction fees that are attached to processing a check. Over the course of a year, your monthly checks would be processed differently since they are all separate transactions. This implies that you’ll pay transaction charges 12 times..
There are also administrative costs to your insurer that are due to monthly payments. For example, it costs insurance companies millions of dollars every year to send out payment notices..
These costs plus a profit margin for this this “value-added service” is included in your premium making it higher than a comparable profile that pays annually every year.
Insurers give give customers who have remained loyal a long term discount and accident forgiveness. Some insurers will give you up to 5% in discounts once you’ve been with them for up to three years while others will give you such a discount only when you’ve stayed for up to five.
Most insurers will also not raise the rates of a long standing policy holder if they make only just one claim. It makes sense for the insurer as it is cheaper to give discounts to existing policy holders than to acquire new ones.
Just bear in mind that some people will be better off if they switched to another insurer notwithstanding the many discounts given to long term policy holders.
If you want to keep your rates down, do NOT “pimp your ride.” If you want to impress your friends with those extra special features like bigger types than the manufacturer’s specification, then be prepared to pay a lot more. Any changes to your vehicle takes your rates up.
It’s a known fact that young drivers attract high rates. More so, the younger an under-25 driver, the more they’d have to pay. That is why teenagers pay a lot more than 22-year olds.
Therefore, as much as possible, do not place such a driver on your own policy. It will drive it up by a huge margin. Your teen driver should have his/her own policy. This will be made possible if you sign an exclusion form.
If a teen is keen on driving then then should be made responsible for at least the cost of their auto insurance. Teens who pay for their own auto insurance are more willing to take steps to bring it down. The full implication of this is that your teen will be a lot safer as they’d do their best to avoid inflating their rates.
There are useful extras and there are those that do nothing but just inflate your rate. A good example of the later is adding a towing service to your policy. By the way, your credit card might already offer this as a benefit so check.
Even if this is not the case with your credit card company, you’ll still get better service and save more if you exclude towing from your policy and you a dedicated towing company instead.
And…
You can get lower quotes on auto insurance today by visiting not less than five insurance quotes sites. Each quotes site will take you about 5 minutes or less to receive quotes. (Some people give information that are not quite correct about themselves. That isn’t a smart move as the quotes you’ll get this way will NOT be of any use to you).
You’ll simply pick the best auto insurance quote for you from the list of quotes obtained. It’s as simple as that. Nevertheless you could easily save hundreds of dollars.