Online Insurance Quotes. Savings from Your Laptop.
For many people, looking for insurance quotes is only marginally more tolerable than filing income taxes. What should be a simple process –protecting yourself from crippling expenses whether it’s a car accident, house fire, or illness –is convoluted by complicated insurance practices, the fine print of specific policies, and a general distrust of insurance companies. Yet, many people end up costing themselves hundreds of dollars by automatically renewing their insurance policies.
Insurance Companies and the Myth of Loyalty and Trust
Many people resist switching insurance companies or even soliciting insurance quotes at the end of a policy term because they believe they’ve found a company they can trust. True, as a consumer, you should stick with a company you can trust, but if you haven’t made a claim since you bought the policy, you can’t really know how trustworthy your company is. When it comes to insurance, you don’t really know what you’ve got until you have to use it. Moreover, if you have made a claim in the past year, this means your insurance profile has changed, once again raising the stakes to get online insurance quotes. If your insurance company raises your premiums –and many companies will after you’ve made a claim –you need to at least look around at the premiums offered by other companies. Some insurance companies are more forgiving than others when it comes to making a claim.
Volatile Insurance Costs and Pricing Strategies
Here are some of the ways in which volatile insurance costs can manifest themselves in specific insurance markets. This data also helps to explain why it’s important to get online insurance quotes every year, and why the best insurance company for you this year may not be the best insurance company for you next year.
- Car Insurance: Most people already know that young drivers present greater risk to auto insurance companies, but New York drivers under the age of 19 have a median car insurance rate that is more than double the rate charged to drivers between the ages of 60 and 74. Some companies are likely to charge young drivers more than they need to because it’s so widely accepted that young drivers have to pay much higher premiums.
- Health Insurance: Not only are health care costs skyrocketing, but the possibility of health care reform is creating additional uncertainty about how fast these costs might rise in the upcoming years. As evidence that health insurance companies are struggling to find the right pace of these rising costs, WellPoint has increased some of their California health insurance premiums by 39% this year with an average of 25% hikes for all their customers.
- Home Insurance: With all due respect to the challenges presented by health insurance, home insurance is still the most volatile insurance market. During years that see few extreme weather events, home insurance can be the most profitable sector of the insurance business. Yet, natural disasters can ruin an insurance company, especially if the company has overinvested premiums leaving it unable to pay out claims. In 2009, State Farm decided to close down home insurance operations in Florida and Mississippi altogether.
Why Online Insurance Quotes?
Getting new quotes each year may sound like a solid plan, but if it takes hours and hours of your time, your motivation will undoubtedly waiver. To this end, online insurance quotes are the best way to review quotes in a time-efficient manner. Here at NetQuote, for example, you can fill out a very brief online form and get matched to insurance companies in minutes. Better yet, by submitting a request for online insurance quotes, the insurance companies will take the initiative to reach you and know they’re competing directly against other companies that have been matched to your request. This allows you to consider quotes at your own leisure from the comfort of your own home, and if you don’t see anything better than what you’ve got, you’ve hardly wasted any time at all.
See how much you could save today on your car insurance. Get your free auto insurance quotes today!
