With a stagnant economy, prices on everything rising, the constant threat of high gas prices, and recent sales and state tax hikes on our automobiles has made it important to find ways to save anywhere we can. A big and easy area to save lots of money is auto insurance. It is amazing that regardless of the commercials like Geico and Progressive telling people to shop for the best rate that 90 percent or more never do. You need to make sure you are getting the best deal possible. You work too hard to through easy money away and make insurance representatives and executives rich. Recent research shows that you can save hundreds or even thousands of dollars just by making a few phone calls and shopping around a little bit.
According to the Insurance Research Council the average savings by shopping around auto insurance carriers is $847. That’s $847 per year and that is a lot of money to throw away. To start saving first call your auto insurance company and ask if you are getting all the discounts you qualify for. Most will happily oblige you on this as they want to keep their customers happy. Discounts could be for things like no accidents, age, sex, driving history, college student, even good grades (I believe just Allstate has this one right now). Discounts of 2 percent to 5 percent may not seem like much but could easily become several hundred dollars or more per year really fast. The biggest deduction is usually a clean, accident free driving record and that can be from 4 to 20 percent or more per year in savings. Just be careful as it only takes 1 infraction to nullify most or all of these discounts.