My Blur was insured through AIS, which is essentially a brokerage. They hooked me up with Starr, for something in the ballpark of $185/year - quite a steal for me/my area. (Liability and Comprehensive with a $250 deductible).
I'll keep the story easy to follow, it's been about a year since I last renewed so I was expecting the bill to come in the mail.
1) Receive letter about insurance, but from AIS
"Dear Edwub, Please note that Starr....recently implemented a rate adjustment...may increase your renewal premium... ....we understand the inconvenience.....pleased to enclose an offer to.....Integon Preferred Insurance..."
Then it had a list of benefits about Integon, such as affordable installment plans, and etc.
2) I open the enclosed offer letter from Integon.
Total renewal amount: 2,419.80
Monthly: 201.40 (192.40 + 9 for 'installment fee') if I don't pay it off at once.
3) Panic.
......WHAT?!
Oh dear flying spaghetti monster, what have I done? My wife is also upset. The main reason is because now I'm wondering if I somehow have been a colossal idiot and somehow thought the monthly cost was the total cost. What if I hadn't paid my insurance company and I've been essentially uninsured forever?
Unlikely - but the second wave of panic is slightly more rational: just how huge of a rate increase did I get from the my current company? I could have sworn it was around 160 to 190 or so. Was I completely mis-remembering the cost? I better start hunting for new insurance ASAP, my policy runs out in two weeks and I don't want to renew with this Integon nonsense!
4) About four days later, I receive the letter from my current insurer.
$199.87 It went up by less than 20 bucks.
I was sitting there at the table. Looking at the "offer" from Integon, then back to Starr. It's over 10 times the cost. I love my Blur, but $2500/year? I remember shopping for insurance when I first bought it over two years ago, that I'd get wildly crazy quotes. I chalked it up to a lot of companies not having it in their system, or having a weird algorithm that missed the mark.
But I'm more annoyed at AIS. You'd think a brokerage type place could do something as simple as....cross-check the quotes? In what business world is..." Hey, your 185 is going to hit 200....wanna switch to 2,500?" reasonable? Was it some sort of weird tactic that backfired: another one of their clients begs them to try to tempt me with their offer instead of renewing. Do they purposefully send the current company a few days later, just to try to make it more tempting to switch? Except in this case, their offer was miscalculated so it came off ludicrous
I ended up laughing pretty hard in relief/exasperation/disbelief. Thought I'd share
