daugen
Epic Contributor
if it doesn't happen too often to you, increasing that deductible will pay for itself in about three years.
Over the last fifty plus years of driving I've saved a lot of money using higher deductibles. But I remember all too well, since I was an agent then,
the change from ACV zero deductible to 50 deductible. Boy that was hard for a lot of folks to swallow.
The difference between a 50 deductible and a 100 deductible is of course 50 dollars. If you can save at least 15 dollars per car by upping your deductible, your payback time is reasonable.
Raising your deductible after a claim is a good time to do it. You want to raise it before the insurance company does. Or worse.
I was judge and jury on tens of thousands of families with crappy driving records and I had to figure out how to cut the exposure without the agent going ballistic, much less the insured.
Junior always wrecks the nicest car on Sat night. Which is why they assign the youngest operator to the most expensive car unless you jump through hoops
to ensure he will never touch that car. And then some companies still won't believe you.
I probably got lied to by more folks than a traffic judge. And since I believe in the innate goodness of mankind, however uncivilized we act at any one point,
it was hard to not shake my head when the reports came back in. Well Fred, it's about this 88 in a 55 in the next state over, you didn't know our contiguous states link up did you?
Well Fred, you add that little boner to your other speeding ticket and your wife's two at fault accidents and your new temporary licensed daughter and now we have a real problem. The little risk counter has gone ding ding ding and your file has been flagged big time.
Sometimes it got down to whether the agency made so much money for the company that they got some slack when they asked for it. Usually it was because the agent went to the same church or the same country club or something where it would be excruciatingly embarrassing to them to non-renew the policy and offer non standard instead. You had to be seriously bad news to not get offered non standard. The pricing was crazy, but still non standard lost money for the company, because you can do a lot of damage with a car or truck and they would
often pay the policy limits. Just risky business and it seemed no matter how much you charged for a 16 year old male operator, it wasn't enough.
And why should 70 year old retired low income Mabel pay more to subsidize Junior's bad driving? Some real social issues got involved, as in what was truly fair.
Most of us just remember paying hugely unaffordable insurance premiums when young, and thought it was horribly unfair.
The reality is the companies make money on the not young and the not ancient. The rest of us subsidize those groups to some degree.
It's funny, I asked my insurance agent if I got something high powered, like a Corvette or Hellcat, would there be a problem? He said absolutely not,
particularly with my high deductibles. He said companies were almost wide open now and were happy to charge more for cars with higher symbols.
thunderstorms coming in, hope they cool things off
