Insurance Companies

Choosing a Good Insurance company: The Options

There are many different automobile insurance companies to choose from and sometimes its hard choosing the right one. A good place to start is asking friends and family what insurance companies they use and how happy they are with their coverage. When asking them about car insurance ask them where they go for car insurance, how their rates are, and if their agent takes care of their coverage needs. You can make a checklist for the different insurance companies and the information on each one such as deductibles and premiums.

State Department of Insurance Websites

You can browse your state’s department of insurance website to find useful information on different insurance companies. They have details on the site such as consumer complaint ratios. A consumer complaint ratio shows the exact number of complaints an automobile insurance company has received for every 1,000 claims filed. By knowing this you can see the quality of different insurance companies. If a company has many complaints, you might want to steer clear of them. If the people making the complaints took the time to file them formally, you know they were thoroughly disappointed.

Agent or Direct Market Company

There is probably an insurance agent close to you for you to investigate. An agent is a popular choice with people because they tend to take better care of you and their job is to make sure that they find the coverage that is best for you. It is best to use an independent agent rather than a captive agent when looking for good car insurance. A captive agent just works for one insurance company while an independent agent look for the best company for your insurance needs.

Using a direct market company might also be a good idea. The attraction of getting automobile insurance from a direct market company is that it is easy and convenient. There are a lot of automobile insurance companies that will offer a free quote over the phone or on the Internet. The coverage that these companies offer can be bought either over the phone or online as well. Sometimes they will also give quotes from other sources for you to compare but generally the quotes won’t be better that the ones they give. This is an easy and convenient way to find car insurance but it is not as personal as by using an agent. If you are not sure what coverage you need or the specifics you should use an agent because they can do that work for you.

Shop around

Before jumping in and buying car insurance do some research and shop around. You can get quotes from many different insurance companies and compare them so that you get the best deal. Just make sure that the coverage is adequate in what you need. You should also get the highest deductible considering that the higher the deductible the lower your premium will be and your payments every month will also be lower. Some other things to look into are if insurance companies offer discounts for things such as multi-car households, good driving record, and safety features on the automobile.