1st-car-insurance-rates

For most of us, we know the importance of car insurance. We are told this by our parents, the TV, magazines that we read and just about anyone that doesn’t like the idea of financial risk when it comes to their automobiles. We would happily go out and buy their car insurance, most of the time a comprehensive plan and think that we are covered by a non-existent bubble of security. This false impression however falls to pieces when something untoward happens and you turn to your car insurance for the protection that they are supposed to offer.

Here we will look at car insurance policies and why you will be severely short-changed if you aren’t careful with it. We will explore the importance of fully understanding what the car insurer provides in their policies. We will also look at some underhanded ways that insurers might try to relieve you of more money than you should be paying for your insurance policy. It is important to note that all insurance companies are very careful with their wording of their policies. This is to cover themselves in terms of excessive pay-outs and also fraudsters that might want to steal their money. The insurers will normally set-up little escape clauses in their policies which if you aren’t careful can mean that these insurers can weasel their way out of their obligations. We’ll have a look at some common ways the insurers might get themselves off the hook and also ways they use to get you to pay more than necessary below.

The most “in-your-face” way for car insurance companies to screw you over when you are submit a claim is to flat out deny the claim. In most of these cases, the insuree will be completely taken by surprise and won’t know how else to proceed. Some are even so dumbfounded by that response that they just forget the claim altogether thinking that they have done something wrong to solicit that response from the insurer. In almost all countries the insurance companies are governed by an insurance regulator that will always obligate the insurer to settle your policy claim fairly and promptly. The regulations almost always side the insuree against any heavy handedness by large insurance companies. If you feel that anything that your car insurance company is doing is not fair then they are certainly setting up themselves to being sued. The best way to respond to this is to write back and simply say that they have made a mistake, state their obligations and ask them to reconsider their previous response. If that doesn’t change their mindset, you can appeal to the state or country insurance governance agency or commissioner to help you with your case. If the claim is large enough then you might even consider bringing up the subject to a insurance lawyer to discuss what bad faith you have received from the insurance company.

Customers should also be very careful with how car insurance companies sneak charges into the policies of current customers to try increase their profit margins. Most car insurance companies work on the assumption that some people actually expect car insurance policy premiums to increase over time. This is especially the case when you might have made a small claim the previous year or if you have made your premium payments late for whatever reason. Sometimes insurers will even sneakily add extra coverage items into your policy hoping that you might not notice. This is even the case for coverage items that you have decided to omit the previous year. You might find that they have mysteriously reappeared in the new policy. If you don’t catch this at the time of renewal and actually pay the insurance companies, you might find it very hard to get back the money even if you request for it.

A report recently published by an auto insurance watchdog suggested that the majority of car insurance companies spend at least 75% of their resources on obtaining new customers. On average they would only spend 25% on servicing their current customers. By this we can see there the car insurance company’s priority lay. Car insurance companies have a habit of offering very good promotional incentives for you to move over to their company however very rarely will extend the same deals to their current customers. It is the responsibility of the policy holder to be aware of any deals that your car insurance company might have and pester them enough that you get the same deals that the new customers receive.

Another way the car insurance companies try to squeeze more money from you is to reduce your deductibles to the bare minimums. When it comes to car insurance, the lower your deductibles the higher your premiums are and vice versa. It is to the benefit of the car insurance policy provider to keep your deductibles as low as possible so they can get extra premium from you. You would sometimes find that it is a default that insurance companies put the deductibles very low. For those who don’t pay much attention to it, they will just happily pay the premiums year after year without thinking twice. Even if you have previously increased your deductibles, you might find that during renewal that the deductibles have returned to “default” setting.

More often than not, the root cause of misunderstandings and general problems when it comes to the claims process is often the policy that is not thoroughly understood by the insuree. The car insurance policy is a contract between you and the insurer, everything about your arrangements are put into wording in the policy documentation. It is for this reason that it is very important to fully understand your policy before paying a cent. This is even true when the time for renewals, some small things may change that might lead to substantial differences in claim ability.

An honest look at car insurance policies and why they might not be as good as they seem. We look at the common let-downs that car insurance companies specialize in and how you can avoid them.