I took advantage of the holiday yesterday and used it to lower my insurance rate. The biggest victory came from changing my home insurance. With Progressive, I was paying $1,206 a year for coverage. I went to Policygenius and sent them a copy of my policy. They found coverage with a Liberty Mutual company that cut the price almost in half, to $649 per year! I saved $557 this year in less than 20 minutes. What I like about Policygenius is that they didn’t try to get me into higher-deductible plans. That would have looked like savings on the surface, but it wouldn’t be a direct comparison between similar plans. The Liberty Mutual plan I now have has even BETTER coverage than my previous plan! So now I’m paying less money for more home protection.
I sent Policygenius my current car coverage, which came in at $111 per month, I am covered through Progressive. The lowest quote sent to me by Policygenius was for $126 a month, so that wasn’t worth moving forward with. I was feeling myself after getting a good deal on home insurance so I went to Progressive’s website and used the chat feature to talk to a representative. She told me they had my old address for the physical address (even though I know I updated it) so by updating to my current address, I’d just saved $9 a month. I then chose to go from a $500 to a $1,000 deductible, saving me an additional $20 a month. I chose to increase the deductible by doing a simple breakeven analysis. When would the reward of saving $20/month outweigh the risk of paying $500 more if I got into an accident? $20/month would save me $500 in 25 months. So if I don’t get in an accident in 25 months, I have officially saved money. Since I haven’t gotten into an accident in over 6 years I’m willing to take that risk. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll select the lowest-deductible car insurance plans from here on out.
Since January is over, I’ll only get 11 months of savings on my car insurance for the year, a total of $319 for the remainder of the year. The $557 was calculated with the start date of coverage being tomorrow so I saved that full amount. So, in total today I saved myself $876 this year. And it only took me one hour. HA!