Insurance Premiums

Remember to shop your insurance premiums on occasion.  I have been with GEICO for nearly five years…  I like the company well enough, but have had ZERO claims in that time, so I haven’t “seen them in action”.  They may be a great company to deal with when you have an accident, but I continually hope that I never have to find out how good or bad the insurance company is…

Anyway, I have a friend who is an independent agent, and when we bought the house, I decided to get him to quote the house insurance for us.  He asked if he could quote the two cars as well, and I told him that would be fine.  He looked at our limits, and decided to double them.  Then he added car rental on.  My thought was that everything he was doing was just going to end up convincing me to go somewhere else…  The quote came in, and it was less than $300 a year more than GEICO.  Except that included the house, whereas GEICO was only on the two cars.

So I called up GEICO to see what they could do.  I told them I got a better rate for twice the coverage, and the quote for the insurance on the house sounded very reasonable, but I wanted to see what they could do.  They informed me that because I’ve been a customer for nearly five years, I would be eligible for “Accident Forgiveness”.  Meaning that if I had a wreck, my insurance wouldn’t go up.

Huh.  wow.   I mean, really?!?  That’s all you can do?  Why would I want to pay about $500 a year MORE money for half the coverage on the off-chance that I file a claim and be protected from my insurance would going up?  Chances are, even if I filed a claim, it wouldn’t jump that high…  And even if it did, I could always go back to the level of coverage I was getting before the change!

So, lesson learned.  Who knows how long I’ve been paying out the nose for insurance, just because I never got them to re-quote me.