Very Cheap Auto Insurance - Tips That Guarantee Affordable Car Insurance Rates

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Auto Insurance Quotes Online

By Matt Hellstrom

The car insurance business has been forever changed by the Internet. In fact, the business today bears little resemblance to what it was before the Information Age first dawned in 1992. Before the World Wide Web took over, most people settled in with one company and stuck with them for home and auto insurance. Not so today. The churn numbers due to being able to get auto insurance quotes online continue to diverge from home - auto combos with the same company.

Insurers have attempted to adjust to the growing preference for getting auto insurance quotes online by a number of methods. Specialized programs for low risk drivers, primarily those over 50, are common now. Year-to-year increases for members of this group are kept at about a percentage point above the inflation rate, which is low enough to keep the client from going through the trouble of shopping around.

A consequence of this, however, is that it has meant that certain insurers are skimming off low-risk drivers, leaving those willing to insure the typical new driver, male, with significantly lower ability to allocate risk. This is why insurance rates for new drivers have increased so dramatically that it has increased the number of males under 25 driving illegally, with no insurance at all. There are on-going debates in actuarial theory about the problem.

But higher rates for young drivers aside, shopping for car insurance online is an eye-opening experience. Before the internet, consumers had to spend hours going through the phone book, punching their way through a voice menu only to wind up most times leaving their name and number on some agent or broker's answering machine. And of course there was the time spent handling the call backs, keeping track of the quotes, doing call backs, and on and on and on.

A recent survey by a well known business school asked 400 online insurance shoppers why they chose to look for car insurance online. The number one response was that they wanted a quote and that was it. Car insurance websites know this and make it as fast and easy to use as possible.

When you are at an online car insurance site, a dialog box will ask you all the right questions - the questions you didn't know you should have been asking. Typically these include; number of years driving, make and model of car, place of residence, whether or not the vehicle is used to commute to work, moving violations within the past X-amount of years, etc.

Perhaps one of the most attractive and informative features of otaining an auto insurance quote online besides shopping for car insurance is when you decide to shop for a new car. Many sites that offer online auto insurance quotes have a feature where people can find out the different rates per vehicle. When evaluating comparable models that vary greatly in dealer invoice prices, the car insurance cost can be a deal breaker or maker.

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