Get The Best Georgia Car Insurance Rates
Reader’s Question:
I moved from Alabama to Georgia and my car insurance rates increased! Why?
Henry
Atlanta GA
The state of Georgia and Alabama have both the same basic coverage of minimum Bodily Injury Liability limits of $25,000 per injured person up to a total of $50,000 per accident, and a minimum limit of $25,000 for Property Damage Liability per accident.
There are several reasons for Alabama and Georgia car insurance rates variations. The first is that there are more population and drivers in the state of Georgia. Alabama had a population of a little over 4.6 million in 2007 while in Georgia they’d a population of 9.5 million. Because of the bigger population, so that means there are more accidents, especially fatalities, in GA than in AL.
The increase in Georgia car insurance rates may be due to the area that you live in. Car insurance is much more costly in cities due to the higher density of traffic, greater probability of theft and vandalism, and higher occurrence of fraud. When you relocated from a more countryside area of AL to a city area of GA your Car insurance rates would increase in part.
It’s been reported lately that there was a sudden increase in Georgia car insurance rates. Car insurance premiums have increased nearly seven percent on average because of new law that doesn’t demand insurance providers to have state approval before modifying car insurance rates.
Although some insurance providers in Georgia have increased their car insurance rates you may still find some auto insurance companies who’ve not changed their underwriting standards and premium rates. Additionally, some insurance providers have only minimally increased their car insurance rates while some have gone for that optimum car insurance rate increase. For this reason in Georgia you should look around for the best Georgia car insurance rates possible.
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.
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