Three Auto Insurance Secrets
Want to learn something new about auto insurance? Something that can save you a lot of money or get a claim paid? Forget the usual tips. Check out these secrets.
1. Demand the legal policy minimums if you have no assets. Do you really need a lot of liability coverage if you do because you can be sued regardless. I can’t promise you that you won’t be sued and end up paying a chunk of your paycheck to someone for lifr. However, honest insurance salesmen admit that people without assets are rarely sued. Lawyers work on a commission in these cases, and won’t take a case where there is no money to be collected. In fact having a bigger liability policy can be an invitation to sue, and it won’t protect you from personal liability, because they always sue for more than the policy limit anyhow. If you have no assets to protect, why buy auto insurance? Because it is a legal requirement in that case why not just buy the minimum coverage required? But be careful. Mu own insurance guy lied for a year, claiming i had just that, when in fact i was paying for “company-recommened minimum”. You might have to push the point, and may even have to sign something saying you understand how risky it is to be “uner-insured.”
2. Claim diminished value. If you have a collision policy. your insurance company will pay for the repairs after an accident. However, is the financial damage really fixed? Not necessarily. A car that has been in an accident and had the body fix may look the same, but it wont sell for the same price. Would you pay the same for car that has been in an accident? A car that has been in an accident might be worth $2,000 less than a similar un-damaged car. This is called “diminished value,” and may be covered by your policy. However, diminished value may be covered by your policy; but diminished value is often not paid unless you push the point. Get a car dealer to do an edtimate of the diminished value if necessary and present this to the insurance company. You pay for insurance to have your losses covered, and they aren’t covered if you haven’t paid for this.
3. Lower your premiums by removing kids from the policy. You may have already discovered the you pay a lot for insurance as long as you have a driving-age child at home. Even if thay are off at school, if their legal residence is you house, you pay more. There is a little-known expection to this rule. If your children are at a college thats more than 100 miles away, you can dramatically reduce your primiums. The catch? They are excluded drivers. So you can’t let them drive the car when they come home to visit.
These are just a jew examples of the auto insurance secrets that insurance companies probably don’t want you to know.