In good hands

When is the last time you priced your insurance?

Joanne & I had Allstate for the first couple of years (auto, then home), but I started shopping for new auto coverage shortly after Joanne got the Pilot. Progressive came back about 40% cheaper (I want to say it was $900 down to $520). The next closest was, IIRC, was about $700. So we went with Progressive.

Aside from the cost savings, the one thing that I've really liked about Progressive is the ability to easily price out changes in the policy. One big thing I discovered is that full glass coverage is probably not worthwhile. Based on our comprehensive deductible ($250), the increase in the premium for full glass would cover the deductible in 1.5 years. So unless I planned to replace glass at that rate (which, to be fair, is close to the rate my Civic got broken into), we're better off taking the risk of paying a glass deductible and self insure instead. Or maybe Progressive charges too much for that. At any rate, the transparency of rates is very nice and easy to get.

More recently, we changed our homeowners from Allstate to Liberty Mutual, with a savings of approaching 50% (from $800 to $430), but that included upping the deductible from $500 to $1000. What's odd is that I got two different quotes from LM. One was through a local broker, the other from the corporate office. Because of the ASU Alumni program, that knocked off about 15%.

Before moving on to life insurance, the one difficulty in shopping for home & car insurance is the importance of service quality. Is it worth paying a little extra for a good reputation of paying on claims? In the end, for us, it came down to the feeling that since no one is happy with their insurance company (looking at online reviews) except for those with Amica and Chubb, price can be the deciding factor, assuming a certain amount of due diligence.

Moving on to life insurance, we recently got matching policies from AIG through Accuquote. The initial salesperson was a bit of a jerk, more interested in selling me what he thought we should have (30 years, $500K), rather than what I wanted (10 or 20 years, $250K), so I ended up working more with a backend person (not on commission) to get the policy I wanted. Although there were some issues in getting a medical issue with Joanne sorted out (records from her surgery 2 years ago) and later, some paperwork from me, we eventually ended up with the 20 year policies.

I went back and forth on which was better, 10 or 20 years, but I concluded for us it was worth the extra money in years 1-10, to lock in the rate from years 11-20. I'm not positive that was the right call, but the difference isn't that huge (<$30/year). The 30 year was cost prohibitive, but the 20 year policy won't quite cover the college years of prospective offspring, so a 10 year policy, then a reassessment of needs at that time might be better... Anyway, there's no right answer here. One thing that I was more confident on was the amount. While most experts say 5-10 times salary, I thought we'd be fine on the low end, given our only debt is the mortgage, which if anything did happen to one of us, the policy would cover, and we each have token amounts from our jobs.

Two policies we don't have are an umbrella liability policy and disability insurance. The former provides additional coverage above the liability in other insurance (ie, it has a really high deductible), but I'm not sure I can see the benefit for us, thought it may be valuable to others. As for the latter, I *think* we each have some amount as job benefits, but that's not something I've looked at that closely. Perhaps I should...