Homeowner's insurance buying decision - price vs reputation
- Thread starter Sojourner
- Start date
calico1597
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Does anyone here use Ameriprise home insurance thru Costco? My cousin bought a home a couple blocks from our winter home. They paid twice what we paid for our house, but their home insurance with Ameriprise is half what we pay with Allstate. I'm not a Costco member, could that be the cause of the difference? Any recommendations for Ameriprise?
COcheesehead
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Take the lower rates. Insurance is one the industries where loyalty is penalized not rewarded. Shop it every year through a broker and move at will.
OP
OP
Sojourner
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This is what I ended up doing. The quote I got from esurance (an Allstate company) was too good to pass up. I did the whole process online, from getting the quote to signing up and paying the premium. Next year I expect to have to shop around again, because I got a couple hundred bucks in discounts and sign-up incentives for being a new customer and other one-time-only things. Have to play the same game every year or two with satellite/cable TV providers, ISPs, and natural gas companies, so it's nothing new for me.
brett
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I read a study a year ago or so that was done in the UK. The purpose was to review insurance premiums.
In a nutshell the findings were that insurer's in that country regularly hiked home an auto insurance rates. The longer you were a customer the more you paid after a few years. This was done to subsidize rates for 'new capture' customers.
The study look at home and auto policies that had been in place for five or more years. They then went out and contacted the same insurance companies with the identical properties/automobiles. The differences between the new customer premium offer and the existing customer rate was as high as 30 percent in many instances. Sometimes higher.
The conclusion was if your rates are going up higher than the rate of inflation in each of the first two years then shop your policies to confirm their competitiveness. We did this with our auto policies and realized a substantial reduction in the premium cost from our existing carrier. Went out for home insurance and found a huge difference in premiums. We went with an insurer who had the best claims reputation in an area near us hit by a natural disaster. They were not the lowest but very close to it.
It pays to shop.
In a nutshell the findings were that insurer's in that country regularly hiked home an auto insurance rates. The longer you were a customer the more you paid after a few years. This was done to subsidize rates for 'new capture' customers.
The study look at home and auto policies that had been in place for five or more years. They then went out and contacted the same insurance companies with the identical properties/automobiles. The differences between the new customer premium offer and the existing customer rate was as high as 30 percent in many instances. Sometimes higher.
The conclusion was if your rates are going up higher than the rate of inflation in each of the first two years then shop your policies to confirm their competitiveness. We did this with our auto policies and realized a substantial reduction in the premium cost from our existing carrier. Went out for home insurance and found a huge difference in premiums. We went with an insurer who had the best claims reputation in an area near us hit by a natural disaster. They were not the lowest but very close to it.
It pays to shop.
