Baglady Alert! Things that Increase Your Auto Insurance!

Today I arrived at the fubby’s place and he was on the phone with someone, and sounded reasonable upset. It turned out to be his car insurance company. He made a simple call to update his address, and the customer service representative increased his insurance rate by almost 100%, even after removing some coverage, the insurance rate still went up more than 50%. The reasoning was that now he drives longer to work. The fact is, we are moving less than 10 miles away from his old apartment, and he is actually closer to work now than he was before. The problem is that, he also changed jobs last year and did not feel like it needed to be reported to the insurance company. So from the perspective of the insurance company, fubby’s commute length changed from 5 miles to 20 miles, and more driving means more risk. From our perspective, my fubby just moved 10 miles closer to work. Honestly, we did not know that moving could affect the car insurance rate that much. So we proceeded to shop on the internet for cheaper insurance, and along the way, I learned a few things.

• Being single increases your insurance — since we’re getting married in less than a month, at first we input “married” as a marital status. Then we thought about it, and wondered if “single” is the correct status since he is technically not yet married. Well, it seems that married people are considered more safe, because the six months quote for “married” was around 21.5% cheaper than the “single” quote.
• Being young increases your insurance — Apparently 25 is the magic number for the auto insurance industry. The quote difference between a 24 year old and a 25 year old is approximately 10%. My fubby is 24.5, so he has the higher rate. Auto insurance is the main reason why many people under 25 have to pay a higher rate to rent a car.
• Even tickets negated by driving school can increase your insurance — on one of the quote forms we filled out, they actually asked for if we’ve gotten tickets that weren’t recorded because of driving school. What is the point of driving school if that information is collected by insurance companies? Not quite sure how much this increases your insurance exactly, but the mere fact that they asked for this information means that they use it somehow, otherwise, it would not fit into their business logic.
• Getting in accidents increases you insurance — I think everyone knows this one, but it seems that different companies assess this very differently, and the difference in quotes is sometimes thousands of dollars. It definitely pays to shop around.

So finally, we settled on Progressive Direct because their forms were the easiest to use and the rate was reasonable. The new policy actually covers more than fubby’s old policy, and once he gets married they said they will adjust his rate down 20%. Anyway, insurance companies all use some sort of proprietary formula to calculate how risky a person is, and some things they do are plain bizarre. I guess we all live and learn.

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