Common Mistakes to Avoid When Doing Auto Insurance Comparisons

In your search to buy the best car insurance available, you’ve hopefully made all of your phone calls, and had several e-mail responses from insurance providers via the Internet, and now you’re read to sit down and see which insurance company is going to give you the best price for the best coverage. It’s a cliché, but you need to make sure you’re comparing apples to apples, and not apples to oranges.

How do you do that? Let’s start with the easy way.

InsureMe.com will do it for you; you simply fill out a questionnaire about your needs, your demographics and the vehicle and the website checks their database, and provides you with a rubric of insurance companies, clearly showing apples to apples values, based on the criteria you entered.

What you want to compare are the categories, such as deductible, comprehensive, liability, uninsured and underinsured motorists and passengers, property damage coverage and exclusions. You want like to like comparisons of the category, and then you want like to like comparisons of the amounts.

If you’ve got individualized quotations, you can make your own chart and compare the auto insurance rates easily. Don’t let it overwhelm you; it doesn’t take an engineering degree, just common sense. You make price comparisons all the time when you do your grocery shopping, think of it in the same terms… how many ounces in the can, Arabica beans to Arabica beans, fine grind to fine grind.

One thing that may not come up on the cost comparison analysis, but you should take a few minutes to find out for yourself, is the rating of the insurance company itself. While the insurance industry is highly regulated on the state level, there are very good companies and there are notoriously bad companies.

There are several rating institutions such as A.M. Best and J.D. Power and Associates that will give you insurance company ratings. The higher the rating, on whatever scale they use, the more comfortable you should feel with an insurance company, and their ability to pay a claim
Your auto insurance comparison of price and service will range from very low to very high, with plenty of variety in between.

The best price may be what influences you, in the end. You should understand, though, that what you gain in savings, you may lose in customer service. If you were in a car accident late on a Saturday afternoon, how happy would you be if you called your insurance company and got a recording that said, “Our office is now closed? Please call again during regular office hours.”
Would it still seem a good value if you had to wait until Monday morning to speak to a real live person?
Ultimately, you get what you pay for.