By: Brian Higdon
Times are tough these days and everyone is looking for ways to save money. Lowering your car insurance payment is a great place to start. If you spend a few hours on the web or making a few phone calls, you might save yourself hundreds of dollars a year on your insurance premium.
The first thing you should do is decide how much insurance you really need. Take a look at your policy and see if there is any fat you can cut. Do you really need rental car coverage or towing coverage? If not, drop that from your policy and save a few bucks. Consider raising your deductible on collision and comprehensive to $500 or $1000 dollars per incident. That can make a dramatic difference in the amount of your insurance premium. If you have a car that is paid for, you can even drop the collision and comprehensive coverage completely. Of course, if you ever get into an accident, this decision may come back to haunt you, but it can definitely make a big difference in your insurance bill right now.
Once you figure out what insurance coverage you need and what you can live without, go on the web and start looking at some of the big sites like www.insweb.com and www.esurance.com. The great thing about these sites is you put in your information one time and you get to see rate quotes from many different companies.
Once you find a company, make sure that they are a well regarded company by an independent rating agency like A.M. Best. You want to make sure that should you ever need to make a claim, the company will actually be there to stand behind their policy.
A great trick to lowering your insurance bill is to prepay for six months or a year in advance. When paying monthly on your premium, you typically pay "full price" for your insurance. However if you pay for six months or a year at a time, the insurance companies will often give you a substantial discount, often times as much as twenty percent off the monthly price. Although it will be a little painful to make that payment for you, getting a discount on your insurance and not having another bill every month will help put a little more money in your pocket.
