Of all the bills you have to pay each month, insurance expenses might be one of the only flexible bills you have. In other words, your insurance expenses can change, and there might be times when they might change for the better. If you are always looking for ways to save money in your budget, you might want to start performing an annual rate check on your car insurance, and here are a few important things to know about this.
What Is an Annual Rate Check?
An annual rate check is something you can do on your own to find out if you are overpaying for your car insurance and to find out if you have the right amount and types of coverage for your cars. You can perform this by contacting your current insurance company and other companies. When you call, you will need to make sure that the insurance companies have all the details about your current situation in life, and that each of them offers a quote that is the same.
To compare quotes, you must make sure that each company is offering the same types of insurance coverage, the same coverage amounts, and the same deductible amounts. If you do not have all the same factors in the quotes, it will be almost impossible to determine which company to choose for your insurance coverage. If all the quotes are the same, you can compare them apples to apples.
What Factors Can Cause Changes in Car Insurance Costs?
There are many factors that can affect the rates you pay for your car insurance each year and changing circumstances in life can affect the discounts you qualify for. For example, if you recently got married, you might now qualify for a discount on your policy; however, if your insurance company does not know you got married, you would not be able to take advantage of this.
Changing jobs is another example of a factor that could affect your rates. For example, if you used to commute to work 60 miles each day but now work from home, you could qualify for a low-mileage discount.
Another example of a change that could affect your insurance is paying off a car. If you recently made the last payment on your car, you might be able to eliminate your full-coverage insurance and carry liability only. If this is the case, your insurance bill could drop drastically.
Any changes that have taken place over the last year could potentially amount to discounts on your auto insurance policy, and this is one of the reasons to check into quotes on your auto insurance coverage every single year.
Will It Hurt Your Credit Score by Doing This?
While your credit score is a factor that can affect the amount you pay for auto insurance, performing an annual rate check will not harm your score. When creditors check your credit, they can either perform a soft inquiry or hard inquiry. Hard inquiries appear on your credit report and typically cause small decreases in scores, while soft inquiries do not affect credit scores. Insurance companies use soft inquiries when checking credit scores for offering quotes, so getting a quote from an insurance company will not hurt your score at all.
If you feel that you are spending too much money on your auto insurance, why not start looking for a new company? You might find that you can pay less money each month for your car insurance while getting better coverage for your vehicles. To learn more, contact an auto insurance company to ask for a free quote for insurance.
