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Home Owners Insurance Rates – Get Low Rates And Save Money

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Home Owners Insurance Rates – Get Low Rates And Save Money

Wouldn’t you love to know how insurance companies come up with your home insurance rates? Maybe you wouldn’t after you underst and what all is involved. The whole concept of insurance started as a benevolent community partnership. Life insurance was the pioneer. When a member of the community passed away the friends and neighbors of that community would drop some money in a hat to help the deceased family give their loved one a proper burial. All insurance is based on the combined giving of local communities. The communities are bigger today and the hat has now become the insurance company. Home insurance rates are calculated by fiduciaries. These folks will add up all of the premiums remitted to the insurance company from a community and will compare it with the number of claims paid from that particular community. These geographical areas are called territories by most insurance companies. When the claims are less and the cost to recover a claim is stable then your rates will be lower. When claims are high and the cost to rebuild and recover is high then your rates will be higher. That is the simplified explanation of how home insurance rates are derived. There are investment factors and many other variables that raise and lower rates also.

Why Shop for Better Home Insurance Rates?

1. Comparing is Easy – It’s not difficult to get a homeowner’s insurance rate. Make sure that you have your declarations page so that you get the apples to apples quote.

2. Comparing is Smart – The worst thing that you can discover is that you have good rates with your present company.

3. Comparing is Leverage – If you like your present insurance company and your agent then a comparison quote from another company will make them work that much harder to keep your business.

There is no better buy in the insurance market than the home insurance policy. Shopping online for rates is one of the easiest methods for comparing rates. Take the time. You will learn a lot the first time shopping online.

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Home Owners Insurance Online – The Internet Proves To Be The Cheapest Source For Insurance

Shopping for home insurance online is easy. There are a ton of websites that make it so easy to enter the proper information in order to give you an accurate quote. The home policy has less required information than the auto policy. Auto insurance depends so much on extensive driver and vehicle information. The homeowner policy depends on some basic information. The most important calculation is the actual square footage of your home. When you shop online they will want this information.

Insurance companies need this because they use various calculators to determine building costs per square footage. The online quote has a questionnaire that needs completed that will ask you some other valuable information that helps determine the replacement value of your home. Air conditioning and fireplaces increase property replacement values. The size of your deck or patio is also considered when determining the insurance amount. There are questions about your garage location. Finished basements increase the replacement value and the online quote will often ask you the percentage of your basement that is finished.

Prior insurance is important when shopping for insurance coverage for a home that you have been residing in for a while. You will be asked about your present insurance. Having insurance is a must when comparison shopping because it is stability and credit factor that will make the risk more acceptable for the insurance company. If you want personal items insured on a rider of some kind then you will most likely need proof of their value. Jewelry riders require recent appraisals and or receipts to prove their worth.

The online quote process may reveal something about your present coverage that you were unaware of. You may find that after you complete a replacement cost estimator with several companies that your home is either under insured or over insured. This is one of the great benefits of shopping online. It enables you to do some of your own research. Shop for homeowner’s insurance online. You will be pleasantly surprised.

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Georgia Car Insurance Quote – What Is A Good Deal?

Some Georgia statistics

The average auto insurance expenditure for 2003 was $758.69 per year. When compared to the rest of the United States this is very affordable. Georgia ranks right in the middle as number 25 in the contest for the most expensive car insurance. The number one position belongs to New Jersey with average expenditures of almost $1,200 per year. In cities like Detroit and New York the averages are much higher and range from $3,000 to $5,000.

Although Georgia is considered affordable there are still many ways to decrease your monthly auto insurance bill.

As any business insurance companies have costs and can only budge so much on what kind of price they can offer. 65% of the premium that you pay goes straight to claim payouts. This leaves only 35% for overhead and profit. Overhead and taxes account for 25% of your premium which leaves 10% profit. (2004 Insurance Information Institute) 10% profit however leaves plenty of room for an individual to compare quotes and shop around for a good deal and find it.

How to pay only for what you need

First and foremost do not insure yourself for damages that you can afford to pay. Insurance is wisely used only to cover damages that cannot be paid for out of your own pocket. For instance compare what higher deductibles would save you compared paying one in the case of an accident. Think about what your driving record has been like in the past three years and make a good guess as to what your record will be like in the future three years. Is it likely to change?

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Free Life Insurance Quote – Important Points To Consider

Taking care of your loved ones with a life insurance policy is a wise decision. Once you have made the decision to purchase a life insurance policy there are other important decisions which must be made as well. Life insurance is not money to be dispensed at the time of your death only. It is also protection for your assets and for the future of your loved ones.

What purpose does life insurance serve?

Obviously life insurance should bridge the gap between the time of grief immediately following your passing and the return to normalcy. Life insurance planning should provide for this short term need. Life insurance must all safeguard the assets you have acquired during your life and pass on as many of those assets as possible to your estate. Make a list of the assets you have and the needs your family will have after your death.

How to accomplish your objectives

Once you have ascertained what it is you want your life insurance to do you must consider how these targets will be achieved. Most of the time making sure that the needs of your loved ones will be met requires more than just a large infusion of cash. A plan should be in place for the proper allocation of the cash received from life insurance policies. There are also tax ramifications which should be analyzed.

Consult a professional

First and foremost the best advice is to get as many quotes as possible and compare. It is free and you will learn more about life insurance faster. There are many laws, particularly laws concerning taxation, which may eat away at the value of your life insurance. Ways to protect your life insurance are available. Using a trust instrument to receive insurance proceeds is just one valuable tool available for protecting your life insurance from taxes. An insurance professional or an attorney can help you with planning your estate to avoid most if not all taxes on your life insurance policies.

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Comparing Discount Car Insurance Companies – Things To Know Before Getting A Quote

You are looking for an insurance policy for your car. Several companies give you proposals; all of them are based on the same information which you provided. The policies have widely varying costs and proposals. How can you wisely choose the best policy and company?

Read carefully

Lay the policies down side by side. Some insurers are able to offer low rates by giving skeleton coverage. You gave the companies identical information but they may not have returned identical policies. Check the deductibles on the policies. Deductibles weigh heavily on the cost of insurance. See if all of the policies offer uninsured driver clauses. Look closely at coverage areas. Some companies restrict their policies if you drive extensively out of state.

Type of company

Just as with home loan companies there are auto insurance companies that specialize in writing insurance for people with poor credit and/or poor driving records. If you have requested a quote from this kind of company their response may automatically be considerably higher than other companies. If you don’t have poor credit and/or a poor driving record immediately eliminate from your search companies that serve these markets.

Investigate company records

States keep records of how insurance companies respond to their customers. Files on insurers will include their response times, their histories of paying claims, any complaints or suits filed against them as well as other important consumer information. Note and eliminate any companies which have numerous complaints against them.

Remember, having a low car insurance premium may not be worth much if you don’t have the coverage you need or can’t get your car insurance company to respond when you have an accident.

Please get as many quotes as possible to insure that you will be paying as little as possible while getting all of the coverage that you need without paying for what you don’t.

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Compare Term Life Insurance – The Only Way To Save Money

Term life insurance shopping is easier than shopping for the equity based permanent plans. It is much easier to compare term life insurance because it is the simplest form of all life insurance policies. Term life insurance consists of a few things that make your shopping relatively easy. Term life insurance means that there is a definite term or period of time that you are insured. The insurance coverage will cease at the end of the term period. The first thing that you must choose is the time period that you need the coverage. A home mortgage policy is the best and easiest example. It is usually a decreasing term policy that declines at approximately the same rate as the home mortgage. It is the perfect policy to protect your home. The amount of insurance and the time period is already in place and that enables you to have a well defined quote comparison.

There are some things to consider when comparing term to term. Most of your insurance carriers will be stock companies. They are owned and operated by the stockholders. Their policies have no dividends. Mutual Insurance companies are technically owned by the policyholders and so a dividend is often returned back to the insured. It is better to compare stock companies with stock companies and mutual companies with mutual companies when shopping for term life insurance.

The online shopper has a great advantage when comparing term life insurance. It makes it so much easier when they are looking for term Life insurance. The permanent plans have so many variables and options as compared to term life insurance. Make sure that you compare the same face amounts with the same time periods. Term policies are sometimes sold in b ands. That means that the rates for higher face amounts may decline per thous and dollars of coverage. You can be aggressive when you know the amount of coverage you need and the length of time you need it. Determine those two needs and then shop until you drop.

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Car Insurance Quote – Things To Know To Get Very Cheap Car Insurance And Quotes

Auto insurance premiums vary widely from state to state and even within states. The same person may find swings of as much as $700 on the cost of an annual policy. Insurance agents are not legally bound to tell a perspective customer about discounts which may apply to his/her insurance. There are, however, things the consumer can do which may lower the price paid for auto insurance.

Higher deductibles

The single quickest and easiest way to lower your insurance premium is to raise your premium. Having a $1000 or even a $1500 deductible can lower premiums 15 to 20 percent. If you decide to go this route, consider putting the money saved the first year into an account earmarked to pay the deductible should you have any accident.

Investigate auto records

Your driving record may be unblemished but the record of the car model you own can also have an affect on your premiums. Insurance copies compile extensive reports on the way cars respond in accidents and how popular certain cars are with thieves. Cars with poor crash test ratings and cars that are frequently stolen cost more to insure. When buying a new car use an auto buyer’s guide to compare crash test and theft rankings.

Use the same insurance company

If you have more than one vehicle insure all of them with the same company. Almost all insurance companies offer multi-car discounts. Many companies offer further discounts if you use any other products they offer such as homeowners insurance and life insurance.

Getting many quotes and comparing them is the best way to check pricing, coverage and save money.

And, don’t forget, the best way to lower your car insurance premium is to drive safely.

Please see our recommended sources for insurance quotes from multiple providers. We have done the research so you don’t have to.

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Bad Driving Practices That Will Give Your Insurance Agent A Heart Attack

I love my career. As an insurance agent in California, I get to work with many different people. Some people prefer to work in person and are very diligent at bringing the necessary paperwork. We develop close relationships and I enjoy getting to know them and their families. I also have clients who want to keep up with all the latest technologies and are full of joy to learn our office provides paperless documents. Here are stories about two of my favorite clients, Sheryl and Mike.

The Best Coffee in Los Angeles

While driving down the interstate to discuss reevaluating her family’s finances and insurance policies with me, my client Sheryl gives me a call. She was already in route and wanted to verify I was in the office. Now Sheryl is a very prompt individual. She is highly organized. Sheryl is one of my most valued clients because she believes in following everything to the letter. She has never been involved in an accident, has an excellent college and retirement plan, and takes ample insurance coverage. All of her insurance paperwork and pictures are filed electronically and updated whenever she makes new purchases. She is also a very frugal individual.

So it alarmed me a bit as she called, but she assured me she was wearing her seatbelt and using her Bluetooth which was hooked up in her truck. She told me she was passing a new coffee shop that opened and heard it was the best in Los Angeles. After I said, I’d like a cup, all I could hear was a skidding noise and horns honking. I asked Sheryl what was going on, she replied that she had to cut across the highway because this cup of coffee could probably save her on her premiums and she couldn’t afford to be late for our appointment, nor pay another toll.

Going Green to Go Red

So, my client Mike is a conservative and laid back fellow. He’s likes to treat himself well and have a good time. I was surprised to hear from Mike not long ago as he told me he was in a new relationship and believed he was falling in love. Mike really wanted to impress his new girlfriend as she was an environmentalist and always talked about green efforts.

So, without ado, Mike enrolled in the Beverly Hills Library and started taking a few computer courses to brush up on his skills. He figured he would start by recycling efforts at home and trying to reduce paper waste. He’d heard a lot of his friends were going paperless with their bills and paying them online, so he wanted to verify my office did the same. I told Mike we sure do and he can even print his insurance cards and we would not need to mail them. Mike was ecstatic. So I helped walk him through everything online and he was ready to go.

One afternoon, I get a call from Mike. Mike had received a ticket the night before. I asked him what had happened and he replied he was on his way to the airport to make a business meeting. He was running behind and speeding. However, he didn’t want to take a chance on being pulled over without his insurance card and left the one I walked him through printing online at home. Mike got pulled over for speeding and pulling his insurance card up online at the same time. Mike talked the officer out of the ticket for not having his insurance card as he h anded the laptop to the officer and told him he was holding his paperless version. However, Mike did get the speeding ticket.

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This is Ridiculous

I am not from California, but I love the State and its diversity of cultures and regions. Being from Texas, I know what it feels like to drive for nearly and entire day, but still be in the same state. In fact, it was a driving trip to Los Angeles from Houston that brought me to the reality that driving out of state is for the birds. They have perfectly good airplanes for things just like this. It took more than 17 hours just to get from Houston to El Paso. That’s ridiculous. You can drive from Houston to Atlanta in 13 hours. As usual I am getting a little off course here, but those of you that know me, that is not that unusual.

As I was saying, you can drive forever and still be in Texas. There are only three states that you can experience something like that; Alaska, Texas, and California. California, however, is the only state in which the scenery and the culture changes so quickly and so drastically. Both, Alaska and Texas are extremely beautiful, but much of the drive through Texas is dry country. A drive up the coastline of California is simply extraordinary. I literally love California. There is one issue; however. The cost of living is totally ridiculous. When you compare the cost of living in California to the cost of living in Texas, the differences are astronomical. No wonder there are so many people from Los Angeles living in Texas.

If you know me, you also know that I am not going to be satisfied with simply expressing my concerns over the disparity in the cost of living between these two states, right? I need to know who in the world is determining this cost of living thing. I know that there is some economist somewhere that is going to chime in and give all of these different economic variables and formulas that contribute to the disparity in the cost of living in different geographical locations. Honestly, I’m not trying to hear it. Plus, I have my own theory about economists. By the way, where were you when the last California brush fire was started (inside joke with publisher)?

For what I paid for my little apartment is Marina Del Rey, I could buy a couple of houses in Houston. Let’s not even discuss places like Beverly Hills, Malibu, and Santa Monica. Man, if there is ever a group of people who need insurance, it is the people in California. There are some people that believe that they cannot not afford insurance, the people in California cannot afford not to have insurance.

Anyway, we still haven’t gotten to the answer to my question. Who in the world determines the cost of living? Does anyone have a phone number or email for this person? He probably does not even live in California. Then again, maybe he lives in wine country. There is something going on in wine country. I have not figured it out yet, but give me a little time and I will definitely figure it out.

For those of you that may be sitting there scratching your head, trying to figure out where you got lost in this discussion, don’t worry, it’s not you.

Susman Insurance Agency

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