Modern Buddy

Have to share this...

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

Little bit of a difference there, no?

When I first received a driver's license back in the 70's, New York had a policy whereby new drivers were automatically placed into to what they called an "assigned-risk" pool. I don't know if they still do that. I was assigned to AllState for a period of two or three years - can't remember exactly. The premiums weren't bad at all, so no big deal. The "assigned-risk" period passed uneventfully and it was time for me to get a "regular" policy. So, I went to AllState, seeing as to how I'd been a customer of theirs for a couple of years, and with a clean driving record. To my surprise, they refused to cover me, citing a company policy of not insuring drivers under the age of 25. Naturally, I was floored by this. I remember arguing with them that they had already insured me and that I had never had any incidents or made any claims. Their response, "Irrelevant, company policy is company policy". In the end, I got a better policy through a lesser-known company at considerably less that what I had been paying AllState. Typical mindless drone corporate bureaucracy.

This is why you always need to get multiple quotes for insurance coverage. Some really flaky stuff goes on out there in the insurance world.

Call their bluff. Sounds like a scam. Don't pay that and switch insurance....

You get insurance for $200/yr?