I recently made a number of changes to my home & auto insurance policies that increased my coverage where it matters and reduced overall costs and I'm sharing so others may benefit from my lessons learned.
First some back story. I'm in my early 30's, married, and been working in a post-college career type job for several years now. I make enough that I'm not living paycheck to paycheck and have an emergency fund established.
Several years ago after I started working and my income increased I increase my auto bodily injury liability policies from my state's minimum ($25k per person / $50k per accident) to the maximum State Farm offered ($500k per person / $500k per accident) since I reached a point where I felt that I had assets and future income to protect in the case of an at fault accident. I had also added uninsured motor vehicle insurance of 25k/50k to both cars.
After doing some research and talking to my agent I made these changes:
- Decreased bodily injury liability coverage to $250k/$500k for both cars
- Increased collision & comprehensive deductibles from $500 to $1,000
- Removed uninsured motor vehicle coverage from one of the cars. Apparently in my state if you have this coverage on one car it covers all cars under the household so the coverage on the second car was a complete waste of money.
- Reduced my house liability coverage from $150,000 to $100,000.
- Added a $1 million umbrella policy which covers all liability above the $250k/$500k autos and above the $100k home.
All together these changes reduced my annual insurance cost by about $350, and that includes the cost of the new umbrella policy. Obviously I am taking more risk with raising the deductibles, and I would not recommend doing that unless you have a good enough emergency fund to cover the higher deductible, but overall this coverage protects me more where I need it (the big losses).
Submitted April 21, 2017 at 09:00AM by Jr712 http://ift.tt/2otHUaH
