What to look for when buying car insurance

You should never purchase the first thing you find when you are looking at buying a big ticket item, although this should be common sense. You visit several shops, find out what's on offer and at what prices. When you know what the market can supply, you can make the best decision on what to buy. It should be exactly the same when you are looking for insurance except it needs a little more work before you start.

Deciding which make and model of car suits your requirements is the first thing you should consider and working out which insurance cover you require for that particular make and model should be the next. Of course, you may simply decide to keep whatever vehicle you have, but you should always consider how much you might save if you switch to a safer vehicle. Only when you know what you want to insure and how much cover you want can you get quotes. Always compare like with like. That's the way to find out that some insurers can ask for car insurance rates differing by hundreds of dollars.

Although you may just be looking for cheap car insurance, never assume all insurers are equal. You need confidence the insurers offering the cheapest rates are financially secure and have a claims-handling process that offers some protection to you as a customer. Companies like A M Best, Moody's, and Standard & Poor rate insurance companies for reliability. Every state also has an Insurance Commissioner. On your local site, you should find information about whether complaints have been made and upheld against the insurers licensed to sell policies in your state. You do not benefit if you buy a policy from a company that sees its mission in life as being to deny all claims made by its policyholders. The good news is that there's a federal program to rescue policyholders if their car insurance company is declared bankrupt. Your policy will be passed on to other insurers. If there are outstanding claims, they will be dealt with by the new insurer. Take care and protect yourself by shopping around.

How to Buy Cheap Car Insurance

Like many things today, it seems as though the cost of insurance is rising. Since all drivers are required to have insurance, more often than not they prefer cheap car insurance. When looking for affordable insurance, there are recommendations you can follow to find the very best coverage at the lowest rates.

Take Advantage of Membership Benefits

Being a member of certain organizations has its perks, including lower rates on insurance. Several memberships are particularly beneficial to drivers. These include AAA and AARP which offer significant discounts on auto insurance. Even membership in chambers of commerce or warehouse chains like Costco can save you money on insurance.

Manage Mileage

The less you drive your car, the better insurance rates you can get. This is because the chances of you becoming involved in an accident are reduced. You may even want to consider pay-as-you-drive insurance programs which track your mileage and bill you accordingly. Insurance companies are more than willing to give you reduced rates in exchange for being on the road less frequently.

Look for Discounts

It is possible to save over 50% on your insurance costs with discounts. All insurance companies offer discounts of some sort. The most common types include safe driver, good student, and senior discounts. But there are many more that your insurance provider offers. It is your responsibility to make sure you receive all discounts you are eligible to receive.

Consider Where You Live

Your location is a major factor when it comes to cost savings. Not only your actual neighborhood but also the state in which you live can impact your premiums. Certain states are simply cheaper. States with fewer people, such as North Dakota, offer some of the lowest insurance rates in the country. Living in states that are more populated, including Florida and New York, will result in higher premiums.

These are just some of the ways you can get cheap car insurance. It merely takes a little work on your part to compare policies offered by multiple insurance companies by requesting free quotes from all who provide cheap car insurance.

Car insurance quotes and the black box

If you ask most folks, they would tell you they were great drivers. What do your friends of family think? It is subjective. Most folks would judge your behavior on whether or not they do the same thing. So how can you prove you are safe driver? How do you get car insurance quotes based on your true driving habits?

Being a safe driver is more than not being in accidents. I have watched a number of people cause accidents on the road that they never knew happened because it was behind them. You have seen it too. The person who crosses three lanes without signaling heading for an exit. You may have even been in the mayhem of tires screeching behind them, as they blindly did what they thought was ok. We have all had the person in front of us who seems to brake periodically for invisible aliens, then speeds away. My all time favorite is the person who has to speed right up to the red light, brake, gun it for the green only to brake suddenly at the next red light and repeat the procedure as if the car only has two modes, stop and go. If they had no accident history, and the insurance company asked if they were a good driver, they would say yes.

What if you really are a safe driver, and want a way to get out of the actuarial table and prove you are better than they are? Go for the box or the pay as you drive program. Europe has been doing this for years, and it is just catching on here. If you car is equipped with a satellite navigation system you may qualify for a program that uses the information from your autos black box to record your driving habits. Otherwise you may get a black box from the insurance company that connects to your under dash diagnostic port. Both will record you average speeds, the speeds that you take turns, how you apply your brakes, and average distances. The box digitally sends the information to the insurance company much the same way you use your cell phone, and analyzed to show exactly how you drive.

There exist black box car insurance discounts

If you know you are a good driver, then compare car insurance quotes for companies that offer black box discounts. Review how their program works, and ask how much you can expect to save.

Auto insurance: commonsense to keep your premiums down

Insurance is all about risk. However, the insurance companies are not gamblers, they have research and years of data behind their decisions. They have actuarial tables depicting life expectancies, ages, gender, race, education and reasons for death collected over time and over population densities. It is the real actual data, hence the name actuarial. Auto insurance companies combine that date with the data that the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) for crash statistics, car safety data, theft rates, repair rates, regional conditions and more.

What does that mean? That means they take your data, plug it into an algorithm in a computer, along with your credit score (gives them a hedge on whether you pay your bills) and come up with your premium. You may argue with it. You may even give them extra data like a bad driving record. Traffic citations, number of years driving, and the number of claims you have made over time all are predictors of your risk. So how do you bring your premiums down even when all the data seems stacked up against you? The answer is simpler than you think.

Work on your behaviors. Start with simple things first like car maintenance. Whether you have an unlimited income and drive a Porsche, or live for the day and drive a beat up old car, setting a routine to check it out before you drive can save you in un expected breakdowns or close calls. Create a notebook where you make your own table. Check your oil on regular intervals and check your tire pressure. Make sure your windshield wash is full. Check the fluids on a regular basis. At the start of fall (and spring depending on how many miles you drive) replace your windshield wiper blades. Have a mechanic, or do it yourself, check the battery condition. Make a note of how many mile you have on your breaks.

Then you can begin to work on your driving behaviors. Leave a little earlier. That way you won't be as frustrated when traffic bogs down because you gave yourself plenty of time. Make a conscious decision to slow for the yellow, stop for at least two counts at a stop sign; and signal for lane changes as well as turns. Statistically people who behave this way have lower premiums...they are lower risks. When you are looking at auto insurance, look at yourself in the mirror and ask "am I worth the risk?"

What factors can affect the cost of cheap auto insurance

There are a wide range of different factors that insurers take into account to work out the likelihood of you making a claim when you apply for a policy. Some insurers assign you to a risk tier, i.e. you are grouped with people who represent a similar level of risk, or you are given a score, i.e. like a credit score. Each company has its own system for assessing your risk profile. That's why it's always worth shopping around. What some insurers classify as high risk, may be treated as less threatening by others. So premium rates can vary quite significantly between the insurers. However, there are a number of common factors in deciding whether you get cheap auto insurance.

Who you are is one of the first factors that insurers take into account with their being more accidents involving young and inexperienced drivers and seniors aged 65 or over. Gender is important as women tend to drive more safely than men. Now we get into the variables. Where you live and your job directly affect the rates. Some ZIP codes have high rates of theft and vehicle damage. Some jobs are associated with poor levels of vehicle maintenance and higher numbers of accidents. How far you drive every week and what the road conditions are like directly affect the risk of an accident. Finally, according to the statistics, young married couples have fewer accidents than singles or older couples.

Now we come to the really important factors. If you buy a make and model with an excellent safety record which is difficult to steal, the cheap auto insurance rates will be low. But if you buy a high-powered monster that's very expensive to repair or replace, the rates will be high. It's the same with your driving record. If you have never picked up a ticket in thirty years of claim-free driving, you have qualified for cheap car insurance. If you have multiple violations, particularly involving alcohol or drugs, you will be classified as high risk and the premium rates will be astronomical. Indeed you may find it difficult to buy any insurance on the voluntary market.

The academically inclined an getting them quotes for car insurance

When you compare us to the rest of the world, the international rankings show us performing badly. European and Asian countries have more postgraduates and graduates and, perhaps more importantly, produce a better trained workforce with math skills and considerable engineering experience. We struggle to build on the Head Start Program to keep the teaching at our schools and colleges on the highest possible level. The result is a slide in the work we can do and, with fewer jobs, we cannot have a better life.

Coming to you as an individual, this means you should always continue studying to improve your knowledge and expand the work you can do. As a teen, you should aim for the best possible grade point average (GPA). Just going through the high school experience is no longer enough. There's such competition for fewer jobs, you will struggle to find anything that pays a good wage. To get yourself better paid jobs you can get a bachelors degree to give yourself an edge, as long as you have a good GPA and SAT score.

Car insurance quotes for postgraduates

As a byproduct, the insurance industry has discovered people with a high GPA and both a degree and postgraduate qualification are less likely to be involved in a traffic accident. It seems people who are responsible when planning their education and future careers, are also responsible when they drive. This means the people who do best in educational terms not only get the best jobs, they also get cheap car insurance. It's a kind of reward for those who do well for themselves, and protect themselves and their families when they drive. For those that don't do well in their academics this may not appear to be very fair, although it is what it is, just like all the different factors that are used to set the car insurance quotes. Whether it is more or less fair that the factors used in a credit score is anyone's guess.