Car Insurance Savings

A wonderful weekend of March Madness viewing!  It is great to see the talent level spreading out as it makes for really great games.  Which of course also leads to busted brackets and boy are mine really screwed up!  But it has also allowed me to see a lot of commercials.  There seems to be three main advertisers now but I am going to talk about the car insurance ads tonight.



Have you ever noticed just how much you could supposedly save by switching to a different company?  If you believe these commercials you could be possibly be paying nothing by switching a couple of times a year.  Everyone has seen them, generally they include a line stating that the average person who switched saved $xx per year where the number is a couple hundred dollars.  The thing they fail to tell you is that if you have been with a company for several years it won't matter who you switch to.  The basics are that each time your policy is renewed they raise your premium a small amount like $5 per month.  So without you noticing it at all you have just started paying an additional $60 per year.  Run that over the course of a few years and suddenly you are $180 or more per year than you were.


Doesn't seem like much, right?  Let me give you a personal example.  I was with company A for about 14 years when I got a second car.  I found out how much my current company was going to add if I added the car and decided I should take the opportunity to see what other rates were out there.  I checked a couple of different companies and did some playing around with the deductibles and what not.  Finally I decided to go with company G because I could put better coverage on the original car and excellent coverage on the additional car for $7 per month more than I was paying for the single car alone with company A.  Now I'm not one to bounce back and forth between companies so I went to the agency to see if they would match the online quote that I printed to show them.  I never ended up showing it to him because all he talked about was how I had a better rate than he had blah, blah, blah.  Needless to say I went with company G and have heard from him each time he knows my policy is due for renewal because he can suddenly save me money.  No, I haven't switched back because he can't save me money.


So now these companies are all talking about how they can save you money except for Allstate.  They only claim to save you money in a few of their ads.  Their focus is now that using one of the online companies isn't going to give you the best assistance when you need it.  The worst part about these claims is that Allstate it the owner of esurance.  So they are claiming that they are better than themselves now?  When are these companies (both the one paying for the ad and the one creating it) going to realize that we aren't stupid?  Why not cut back on the advertising and sponsoring to provide lower cost insurance?


Oh, wait, if they did that it may be logical.  I guess that won't work...