Simple Ways To Lower Auto Insurance Rates In Georgia

Reader question:

I get so mixed up with my auto insurance. I have so many bills to pay each month and I just don’t have time to figure out how to lower my premium. What can I do?

Jack in Atlanta Georgia

Thank you for asking, Jack.

You know, there is actually a way that you can kill two bird with one stone, and lower the stress of multiple bills while also lowering your  auto insurance premium. This is pretty simple to do, and might take a few minutes of your time, but it will be extremely valuable in your future.

The key to a cheap, stress less, Atlanta Georgia auto insurance rate is to

• Combine, combine, combine!

The first thing you need to do, Jack, if look at each of the insurance companies that you are with, not just your auto insurance company. What kind of insurance do they offer? Many companies will offer life, home owner’s, and auto insurance, while some will only offer one kind of insurance. If you have the latter type holding your policies, then you need to ditch them and find a company that offers more.

Once you have decided on a good auto insurance company that also offers other types of insurance, you should buy all of your insurance policies through them. Not only will you essentially consolidate your insurance bills, making them easier to keep track of, but you will also lower your premium through the multiple policy discount that most companies offer.

• Join, join, join!

You don’t have to go it alone on your  insurance premium if you have another choice. If you have a fiancée, why not combine your policies into one  insurance policy? Same with a wife, or a roommate, or even a good friend. By adding someone else to your policy, you can save a lot of money on your  auto insurance premium, especially if that person is lower risk than you are.

Raise your deductible amount to $1,000. If you are a safe driver and have not had any accidents or claims in the last 5 years raising your deductible could be a super easy way to lower your annual premium.  Remember, you only pay the deductible amount when you file a claim with your insurance company and they pay that claim.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

What Auto Insurance Discounts Are Available In Georgia?

Is your car safe? It doesn’t have to be as safe as this little car, dodging flying cows and avoiding tornadoes, but a certain degree of safety should be expected from any vehicle, and the standards are only getting higher. Not only will a safe car aid in avoiding accidents, but if you have one then you can also expect a  auto insurance premium discount. People with safer cars file fewer claims, so they naturally are charged less on their car insurance premium. However, the more safe your car is, the more expensive it usually is as well, and more expensive cars do cost more. The auto insurance discount is higher for safe cars, but to get the best deal you should check in with a car that’s at least a couple of years old.

Here are a few things you should look at in regards to safety when you’re trying to buy a good car that will have a low auto insurance rate.

• How well does it wreck?

A big factor in a car’s insurance quote is its crash worthiness, which is determined by government crash tests. To find out how well your future vehicle does on these tests, you can go to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety website, where they have crash test results for side impact, front impact, injuries, and more.

• How is it built?

There are two factors under this category that will affect your vehicle’s safety and as a result your insurance quote, and they are

• Restraints.

These tend to be a given on any car, but they should be taken for granted. Restraints have caused the largest decline in injuries and deaths from car accidents, and it is unlikely to see anything that will work as well as a simple seat belt.

Other types of restraint devices include air bags, which can be placed in various areas of the vehicle. They work best when they are combined with seat belts, especially shoulder restraints which protect the person from the force of the air bag as well. Georgia auto insurance companies are actually required to have discounts for seat belts and air bags, even though almost all cars have them.

Active head restraints are also helpful. They protect your neck from breaking by being jerked back from the force of the crash. They can usually be adjusted according to height.

• Anti lock disc brakes.

Anti lock disc brakes are part of a new wave of panic compensation technology that help you from getting into an accident when conditions cause you to panic. For example, if you’re driving on an icy road and the person in front of you stops suddenly, then you might hit the brakes quickly as well to avoid crashing. In a normal car, this action could cause skidding and you might end up worse than if you hadn’t hit the brakes at all. With anti lock disc brakes, though, the system keeps the wheels from locking up and allows you to make sudden stops safely. Aside from that, many insurance companies provide discounts for them.

• Daytime running lights.

Many people might not realize the impact of these lights, because they don’t see why someone would need lights during the day, but daytime running lights help set a vehicle apart from its background and thus make it more noticeable. They do, in fact, lower the incidence of daytime car accidents.

Are Your Georgia Auto Insurance Rates Rising?

Reader question:

What’s the point of a stupid renewal discount if my Georgia  auto insurance rate stays the same or is higher every time I renew?!

Beth

Great question, Beth.

It’s frustrating, isn’t it? I’ve been getting my auto insurance coverage with the same company here in Georgia for a couple of years, and while I have been tracking what effect other discounts have on my auto insurance premium, the so called renewal discount has been pretty elusive. My auto insurance rate goes up every time, never down unless I apply a new discount to it or get a safer car; all things staying the same, my insurance quote will rise.

There are several reasons for this that neither we nor the car insurance company can control, such as:

• Cost of vehicles. As each year passes, it costs more to buy a car. A more expensive car will have a higher auto insurance rates.
• Cost of repairs. As vehicles become more expensive, so do their parts. The higher the cost to repair a car is, the higher the quote will be.
• Cost of health care. I went to the emergency room once and was given some aspirin and told to go home. A month later, I got a bill in the mail for five hundred dollars. I think you can see for yourself how that would affect your rate.
• Lawsuits. The number of lawsuits has stayed the same even as crashes with injuries have decreased, and the amount of money awarded is phenomenal.

On the bright side, while your auto insurance rate has a good chance of increasing each time you renew it, premiums as a whole are increasing less and less every year. The last year that the estimates were on record for, 2004, nationwide premiums only went up 3.4%, part of a trend of lower and lower increases that should be even better this year and in 2008, if the trend follows through.

People aren’t filing as many claims as they used to, and this is part of the factors that temper the rise of your insurance rate. Another thing that helps out is that cars are made more safely with features that both prevent accidents and make them less damaging when they do happen.

However, since even with the lower number of claims, car insurance companies are spending more on each individual claim, you will likely only see your  rate rise for years to come, although we could have an actual decrease in our future.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

Does My Credit Score Affect My Auto Insurance Rate In Georgia?

Reader question:

Does my credit score affect my auto insurance premium?

Max

Atlanta Georgia

Thank you for your question, Max.

Georgia auto insurance companies have been looking at the credit reports of prospective customers for years, but it is only recently in the past twenty years or so that, with the advent of computers and the internet, they have been able to gather that information into a final number, called an insurance score, which is used in the calculation of your auto insurance premium. This insurance score, based on information in your credit report, can be the difference between a person with a good driving record but a high insurance premium, and another person with the same record and a much lower premium.

• Is it legal?

In some states, the question has come up as to whether or not credit scoring with car insurance premiums is discriminatory against low income and minority groups. While it does affect people who fall into these categories more than most, it doesn’t anymore than credit scoring affects people when buying a car or doing anything else that requires credit.

As great as it would be for auto insurance companies to give out premiums that are low cost regardless of risk, that is simply how business works. In order to make money, they need to charge the people who will cost them more money higher premiums, so that the people who are less likely to file a claim don’t have to pay enormous premiums. Insurance companies make a lot of money, but the profit margins aren’t as consistent or large as with other types of companies, so it is a kind of tightrope walk.

• Why do they do it?

Now that we’ve covered the fact that insurance companies need to charge more to people with higher risk, how are people with bad credit histories higher risk? After all, your credit score doesn’t affect your driving, does it?

Technically, it doesn’t, but there are a lot of factors that don’t necessarily affect your ability to drive, such as your grade point average, which auto insurance companies consider when figuring out what your premium will be.

What companies have figured out is that people with bad credit history tend to file more claims than people with good credit history. One of the reasons is, for example, that people who live in dangerous areas are more likely to have bad credit, and thus are more likely to have their car stolen, which would raise comprehensive insurance rates.

Some people claim that this credit report shouldn’t be used by Georgia auto insurance companies, because correlation is not the same as causation. That means that just because people who have bad credit scores file more claims, it doesn’t mean that the credit score had anything to do with it.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.

Atlanta Auto Insurance Payment Plans?

Atlanta auto insurance don’t exactly accept cows and vegetables in exchange for car insurance policies, but they do offer a wide variety of payment methods that allow modern drivers to keep up and find a method that fits their circumstances.

• When do I pay?

There are two basic options for paying your Atlanta auto insurance premium, and those are

Both have their perks, and the truth is that you have to make your decision based on where you are financially, and try to work your way from one to the other. There is, actually, a difference between your Atlanta GA auto insurance rate if you pay all at once than when you pay in installments, because if you pay in installments you are charged an installment fee. This isn’t a huge fee, but it does save you a few bucks to avoid it, and not only that but paying all at once will save you the headache of monthly Atlanta GA auto insurance premiums.

If you don’t have the money to pay an entire six month premium up front, then the trick is to work your way up to it. Put a few dollars aside here and there, and it might take a couple of years, but once you get there it will be much more easy to save. It’s best to at least try to pay the entire premium at once, especially for those of us who are trying to get their Atlanta auto insurance premium as close to zero as possible, or those who are high risk and need all the help they can get.

• How do I pay?

Atlanta auto insurance companies are online, or at least most of them are. While some companies have very basic sites with perhaps a location and phone number, most of the decent sized companies these days are really putting on the glamor with their websites. They contain information on coverage and instant auto insurance quotes, but most of all, they contain the option for paying online.

In addition to paying online, you can also pay more traditional ways, such as through direct debit, mailing a check, paying at the office, or paying over the phone.

How Can I Lower My Georgia Auto Insurance Rate?

Usually there is some kind of catch to lowering your Georgia auto insurance rate, and you don’t simply get a discount or a better rate for free. If you want to pay less on car insurance, then you have to drive less, or make better grades, or do some other thing that might not be hard but is ore than nothing, and lowers your risk.

High deductible auto insurance is one of the prime examples of these catches, and many people avoid it because, they say, they are buying auto insurance to cover them. Why do they have insurance at all if they have to cover themselves?

Let me rewind. The deductible, first of all, is what you pay towards injuries and repairs and the like whenever you make a claim before your car insurance coverage kicks in. So, if I were to get into an accident and the damages to my car amounted to three thousand dollars, and I had a thousand dollar deductible (which I do), then I would pay that amount and the car insurance company would pay the other two thousand in repairs. The amount of the deductible never changes, even if the damages are only about five hundred dollars or fifty thousand. Deductibles are only paid when you are found to be at fault for the accident.

Raising your deductible from the bottom $250 can lower your auto insurance rate significantly, because it allows the car insurance company to pay less. Instead of avoiding this, raise it and start saving money for whenever you do get into an accident and have to pay a deductible. Most people only file a car insurance claim once every five years, so it’s likely that you won’t need your deductible much and you’ll probably save up way more than that amount by the time you have to pay it out if you just save the difference between your auto insurance rate with a low deductible and your auto insurance rate with a high deductible.

You can save a lot of money this way, and not just on your auto insurance rate. A couple of years ago, when I first raised my deductible, I started putting the money I was saving on my  auto insurance rate into a high interest savings account, and now let’s just say that it’s a lot bigger. So why wait? If you’re a safe driver and the likelihood of you getting into an at fault accident any time soon is pretty low, start saving money as soon as possible.

What Determines Your Auto Insurance Rate in Georgia?

Reader question:

How do car insurance companies determine my auto insurance rate here in Georgia?

Paul

Thank you for your question, Paul.

There are so many factors that go into a single Georgia auto insurance quote, that I can’t even begin to address them all in a single post. A few decades ago, the factors could be counted on the fingers of one hand, but each year the process grows more complex. What I can do, though, is tell you about one thing that auto insurance companies look at to determine your insurance rates.

• Your CLUE report.

The majority of policy holders don’t have anything on their CLUE report, and this is mostly because the information only remains there for ten years. Unlike credit, which most of society uses constantly, the average insurance claim is filed only every half a decade or so.

The CLUE report is not connected to you yourself, but, much like your auto insurance policy, is connected to your vehicle. The CLUE report will have information on any past claims and repairs, and when you get a new car you can purchase a copy of your CLUE report from ChoicePoint. Since it does affect your insurance premium, it is probably a good idea to buy a CLUE report before you finalize the purchase of your car.

Like a credit report, sometimes CLUE reports contain mistakes. If you see one, you should contact ChoicePoint to have the offending note removed. This takes less than a month in the majority of cases. Unlike a credit report, though, if you have some information that would make your CLUE report look better, such as the installment of an anti theft device, then you can have that added to the report, making your auto insurance rates go down.

• Your CLUE report and your GA auto insurance company.

Once you are already with a company, they will almost never check your CLUE report again. Normally, these reports are looked at when you are getting a policy with a new  insurance company.

The CLUE report will not be used the same across the board by every insurance company, but the number of claims you have on it will certainly determine whether your rate goes up or down.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.