Reasons Why you are not Getting the Best Car Insurance Rates

Spending more than you should on car insurance is definitely no fun. It’s frustrating to find out that you have left money on the table for many years and have been overpaying for car insurance when you could have saved a nice amount. This article will show you some of the reasons why you are not getting the best car insurance rates at this moment.

You have a poor driving record

Even if you haven’t had any accidents or filed any claims in the last five years, you should know that your driving record contains all violations you have been sanctioned for lately. Being caught speeding, changing lanes without signaling or tailgating gets you demerit points, which are registered in your driving records and are there to stay between twelve and eighteen months, depending on your state regulations. All traffic tickets will add up towards an insurance surcharge, except for parking ones.

Major violations like driving while intoxicated, hit and runs and other criminal offenses will stay on your record for longer periods of time. DUI’s, for instance, usually lead to a SR-22 requirement for three years.

You have a poor FICO score

A decade ago, the credit score was the instrument financial institutions used to assess your abilities to pay back a loan. Nowadays, a lot of service providers are interested in how you manage your finances and are allowed to query the credit bureaus for your FICO score.

Statistics show that drivers with a poor score are usually irresponsible drivers too, they tend to drive aggressively, file more claims than average and may be inclined towards committing insurance fraud.

A value of 750+ is considered excellent and the insurer won’t have any reason to think twice before insuring you. However, once the score drops below 700 and gets close to 650-ish, it will raise some red flags and you will be put under further investigation. If you find yourself in this category, start working on improving your score as soon as possible – you will need it for much more than getting cheap auto insurance.

You haven’t used an auto insurance comparison tool

The old fashioned way of writing down a list of insurance companies and calling each of them (or visiting their website) to ask for quotes belongs to the early 2000’s. If you do it this way, you will probably get bored halfway through, since it will be a long and tedious process, and you will settle with what you have found so far. You may be losing money.

The modern age has brought us technology. There are many car insurance comparison tools such as the on in Reyess, where you simply type in your name, zip code and sometimes email address and then the system lets you compare quotes from a wide range of insurers by filling out one form for all, instead of one for each. This speeds up the process a lot and, most importantly, lets you compare apples to apples – you can be sure that the prices you get are for the exact same amount of coverage.

Other Related Content