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Yes my car insurance jumped $100 the minute I paid off my car.
I've found that this is usually a "staying with a single insurance provider" problem. I usually end up switching every two years or so, but I check everytime my six month renewal comes up. I've found that my premiums pretty consistently go down so long as I keep looking around. The last few times I switched from geico to progressive then back to geico, and the cost went down each time I switched.
Fun fact. At the last call to make sure my insurance was switched over properly, I had the csr angrily explain that in order to get the same affect, all I had to do was ask for a reevaluation of my policy. It turns out that the automated systems that send out your new price every renewal don't do a good job of adjusting the premiums down and you're supposed to ask a person at the company to review things if you don't like the automatic price.
I plan on continuing my personal policy of switching providers every few years anyways. I'd rather have the new customer prices than deal with a person on the phone going through every option to see if the new price is actually better or worse than the competitors offers.
I had the csr angrily explain that in order to get the same affect, all I had to do was ask for a reevaluation of my policy
"If it's hurting your customer retention, it sounds like you stupid fucks need a reevaluation of your pricing policy"
As a fellow bureaucrat, I absolutely understood his frustration. Why go through the entire process of switching insurance, risking missed coverage days, and other bs, when you could just call and have a person look at the generated evaluation numbers to fix things? He wasn't mad at me; just had his professional bride bruised when he found out that I was getting the same effect as the official process by doing (in his eyes) even more work than a simple call would be.
I actually love finding these things in my job. Whenever someone does something that looks really silly on the surface, but as soon as you look into it from a user persective you find out it's just as good (or better) than the official process you originally expected. It's always trippy finding them because you have to turn your brain around to understand why they did it. And you always wanna keep it in your back pocket if you ever end up in a similar situation.
Not saying the UK has it right (cos we definitely don't) but the 'loyalty penalty ban' has really helped.
You can't be charged more for staying with an insurer than if you were a new customer.
I've always heard the best way to keep the costs down was to keep switching insurance providers. Unfortunately my wife chose to buy insurance from her high school friend
Ugh yeah. And I have renters insurance through the same brand. I’ll have to look at swapping.
It's your fault for their dumb system you dunce. Ask next time dumdum
it's your car now, not the bank's. so you can reduce your coverage and lower your premiums. the higher rates are to make sure the insurance company doesn't lower their profits when you drop the 'full' coverage.
Yeah. Between this and the “switch providers” advice I will be looking at it. I am not sure I want to reduce my coverage though. Where I live people are absolutely batshit. I know everyone says this…but I’ve never felt more in danger driving than I do in Connecticut, surrounded by people rich enough to murder me with their car and think of it as an inconvenience.
Yeah, it's crazy what people do with insurance. We have a really odd car insurance plan. We just have a single mid-2000s Carola as our only vehicle. So we don't bother with full coverage. If the car gets totaled, oh well, we're out a few thousand. But what we do go all out in is the liability policy. I'm not worried about the 20 year old Toyota. I'm worried about losing our life savings if I cause an accident and end up putting someone in a wheelchair for life. So we buy the largest liability coverage we can, and then we have a million dollar umbrella policy on top of that.
To me this seems the only sane way to do it. Not only do I want to make sure I'm not financially destroyed if I cause a big accident, but also, just from basic compassion, I want to make sure that anyone I might hurt is well taken care of.