Posted by admin on April 10th, 2010
Doesn’t it feel sometimes that when it comes to auto insurance it’s like playing the game no one tells you how to play it right and where the rules are written without your consent? Well, to ease the situation, here are some auto insurance rules most insurance companies won’t tell you about.
1. If your credit rating is good you will have better rates.
Most of the insurance providers, whether big or small, use credit information to determine the rates you will be charged with. That’s because numerous studies have shown that there’s a direct link between a person’s credit rating and the probability that the very same person would file an insurance claim. Those who have poor credit scores tend to file claims more often than drivers with good credit reports. And we know how insurance companies don’t like insurance claims.
Tip: If your credit report is not that good, don’t haste with buying auto insurance. First, make sure you have settled all your debts and closed unused credit lines. After doing this wait for a month and your rates will be much lower than you would expect. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by admin on April 9th, 2010
When it comes to paying the premiums vehicle insurance can give you a bunch of unpleasant problems, especially if you have a costly car to insure. And “costly” doesn’t necessarily mean “expensive”. You may ride a cheap car that will cost you hundreds of dollars more to insure than a large SUV. It may seem illogic at first, but you will have to understand the way insurance companies asses risk in order to find the perfect car to lower your insurance costs with.
Insurance companies analyze a set of elements regarding each car make and model before giving you a quote. It’s not that insurance providers have prejudice against certain makes. Each car is analyzed and evaluated by how risky it is to insure. The factors that will influence a car’s insurance rating include: passenger safety; damage and injury scores; theft rates; repair costs. These factors vary significantly between car types and within types as well.
Passenger safety. It’s evident that if a car has low passenger safety it will be costlier to insure. Why? Because the insurance company is more likely to pay for the injuries a passenger will sustain in this car and they want to cover their risks respectively. So before you buy a new or used car, take some time to analyze its crash test scores and if they are low don’t even bother buying it, no matter how cheap it may be. Besides saving your life you will also free yourself from high premiums with such a ride.
Damage and injury. Somewhat similar to passenger safety, this factor also analyzes how much damage the car is likely to deliver to another vehicle, its passengers or infrastructure. That is, if a car is quite big to ruin a concrete wall or total the other car it had collision with it is likely to be more costly to insure. That’s quite often the other side of the coin of having a big SUV car that is safe for the people who are inside it. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by admin on March 21st, 2010
In the good old days, people were trapped in their employment. The lyrics of the classic song, “Sixteen Tons” say it all: “Another day older and deeper in debt… I owe my soul to the company store.” The company paid, but the only place to buy food and the other necessities of life was the company store. With the prices set unaffordably high, people had to go into debt to put food on their tables. In accounting terms, they never ever paid off that debt. It’s a strange reflection on those times – that employers felt their labor would never willingly stay loyal. Today, people are more free to sell their labor and, if the job is not good for some reason, they can move on to try somewhere else. To that extent, employers have to build up a relationship with their employees. Trust and loyalty must be encouraged on both sides. It’s the same with those who sell goods and services. There are vast numbers of potential customers “out there”. How do you convert “potential” into “actual” and then keep those customers loyal? Well, Toyota seemed to have the answer to the question and then, as it slowly forgot about the need to maintain their customers’ good opinions, lost their brand image for safety and reliability. What price loyalty from Toyota customers?
Moving to the insurance industry, we find the same “for profit” attitude that has just driven Toyota into a wall. Insurers should be looking after their customers, ensuring they always have a good experience, particularly when making a claim. Instead, the insurers have this remarkable reputation for trying to weasel out of paying the full value of every claim made. It seems the words, “small print”, were invented just to let them off the hook. Why, then, has the free market not operated to drive them out of business? Ah, the wonders of capitalism do not apply to the insurance industry. We get caught in so many different ways. First off, all but three US states make it mandatory for us to have auto insurance. That forces us to look for the product. Then we run into the insurers’ exemption from the antitrust laws. Sadly, in 1944, the federal government thought it would be a good idea if the insurers did not have to compete with each other and no administration has had the political will to repeal that law. So we get prosecuted if we drive uninsured, but have to pay whatever premiums the insurance companies feel like asking. Life is just not fair. Read the rest of this entry »
