To start, I should clear the air on some common misperceptions. 1. Your insurance agent doesn’t magically come up with prices based on what you’re paying now, we type things into a computer and get a price. 2. It doesn’t matter if you’ve never been in an accident, what matters is (typically) the last 2-3 years, maybe 5 years if it was serious enough. 3. Lawsuits happen more often than you’d think, and many times the state minimums for liability heavily predate the modern era’s high medical bills. This is something you don’t want to pay for but god damn you’ll be glad if you did if it comes down to it.
Now that my drunk self has gotten that out there let’s talk about ways to actually save money. To clarify, I work for a “low-risk” insurer which can offer great rates to those with a magical combination of insurance buying history. Some of the largest rating factors and ways to have them work in your favor are below: 1. Credit: I know there’s not much you can do about this one so... we’ll move on 2. Prior liability limits: this one is dependent on the company but a good rule of thumb is this: if you want future rates to be lower, get at least $100,000/$300,000 in liability. I know this sounds expensive but... if you have a progressive policy for example you can switch the liability and within a month or two your future insurance agent will be able to see that insurance history and whoosh potentially 20% in savings on your future policy. 3. This only applies to those of you who don’t currently have a disability policy in place: one way to really juke the system is to “coordinate” your work loss benefit. All this means is that you get a policy that means if you’re hurt in an auto accident, it’s not your car insurance that pays for it. The risk with this is that to make this effective in saving money means you need a really small disability policy, need to be young, and should not have told a doctor that you smoke in the past 12 months. You can get a policy that costs $15 a month but in a high price area you could be saving up to $50 a month in just coordinating this one benefit.
This last one is risky, and has some small implications and requires some prior research but, in normal circumstances, many big insurers don’t fact check much of what you say. The big thing being the coordination of medical bills. This is the same as the disability above but applies directly to medical bills from an injury. Anyway this can result in a huge saving and you should just say “yeah I have healthcare through my work, It covers me in an accident” stop there, and please stop saying “I have Medicaid/Medicare” once you say that we have to be primary and then those magical savings are gone. Don’t commit fraud just... leave out a detail or two unintentionally.
September 05, 2019 at 07:59PM
