Auto Insurance and Car Insurance Buying Secrets – Buy Insurance in a Group Discount Program
Author: Craig DeRoche
Source: ezinearticles.com
Auto insurance is probably the most used and the easiest to find insurance coverage in America. Whether you are driving through your town, surfing the Internet, opening your mail or even just watching television you will learn of every single possible method to buy auto insurance available in the marketplace.
There is a lot of good news that comes with this. The most competitive prices for any product or service are found in a market where the most competitors exist. Unlike automobile manufacturing companies, the airlines or other large established industries, there are not a few companies but rather thousands of large and established insurance carriers eager for your business.
The bad news is that you have so many choices in so little time is very difficult to discern where the best deal may be found. The old fashion way of sorting through options was to call or visit with the local insurance agency in your town to get different price quotations. This was a very time-consuming process as each visit was filled with the same questions and answers provided to the previous agent you had spoken with. Making a decision between agents that you had not personally met and who are calling to follow up with you created in our court situation that had not existed previously.
The modern version of the same process is to search the Internet for insurance options and pricing differences for your vehicles. Many auto insurance for car insurance websites have appeared in the last 15 years to provide instant quotations and even comparison pricing between several competitive insurance companies. This product had a lot of promise when it launched in the previous decades, but has devolved into a business in which your personal information gets routed to insurance agents who have never met nor intended to communicate with in the future. In other words, you get to save time up front but get a bigger hassle on the back side.
There are some companies that make buying auto insurance or car insurance very easy for you and the ads that they place on television run on every station on seemingly every commercial break. You simply visit their website or call them and they will save you hundreds of dollars or so the advertisement says. No one really explains how every single insurance carrier on TV could possibly be $400 less than every other insurance carrier on TV but that is this beside the point they would tell you.
So the Internet has held out great promise for auto insurance and car insurance buyers, what in many ways has come up short. Automation and compact direct distribution methods of the television insurance marketers claim great things but offer unrealistic comparisons. Where exactly does this leave an average consumer looking to get a good deal on one of their most expensive monthly bills?
Many savvy auto insurance buyers are quick to tell you the secret that they have learned over the years. It is a secret that has worked when visiting the local insurance agents, searching the Internet and more recently is working with some of the television auto insurance carriers. The secret is very simple — they buy their insurance through a group that they are either a member of or are affiliated with.
Examples of such groups are membership organizations such as the Senior’s group you see on TV, the NRA and others. Other groups such as alumni associations, credit union members and others have had great success over the years. It may surprise you to learn that Geico itself was formed from a credit union that group its members together to save money on auto insurance. GEICO actually stands for “Government Employees Insurance Company”.
So how do you go about finding group discounts that you may be eligible for? Well, for starters you can look at your alumni or trade magazines for advertisements, you can check your credit card or bank statements for inserts informing you of savings or you can set out to find them on the Internet.
Knowing where the best group discounts are available at the time you actually sit down to review your insurance bill (which is likely only once a year) can be an undertaking in itself. Many new services are beginning to be created to help you with this process so that when you are ready to price your insurance you will be able to find a group discounts for which you are eligible for.
To learn more you can visit websites such as InsurancePen.com that aggregate insurance cooperative group discount programs. InsurancePen.com will even let you create your own new group program for your organization or network of other buyers.