Yahoo Autos Here's how to lower your car insurance premium in 2024
As we've seen over the past couple of years, one of the biggest drivers of inflation has been car insurance — with car insurance premium costs up over 20% in the past year alone. Over five years, rates have gone up 88% in Florida and 50% in New York, Nevada and Colorado, to cite a few examples. Insurance now costs the typical car owner $212 per month, or $2,545 per year, according to Bankrate. Some of this is due to factors that consumers can't necessarily control, such as the high cost of collision repairs involving modern driver-assist technology.
So what can we do to save money on car insurance? Several things, actually.
How to lower your car insurance rate:
Stop speeding: This is the biggest step we can take by far. Speed kills. It also maims, injures, dents and damages. As a nation, we've been on a speeding spree ever since the Covid pandemic. It caused a spike in traffic deaths that is only now beginning to subside. In 2021, the latest year for which NHTSA has full data, 28% of fatal crashes, 13% of injury crashes, and 9% of property-damage-only crashes involved excessive speed — 12,330 people lost their lives in those crashes.
The payoff to your insurance bill from observing speed limits might not be immediate, but eventually the virtuous cycle of less speeding equals few crashes equals few claims will pay off. (That is, if most or all of us do it.) Then again, there is one way to make safe driving pay off right now. We'll get to that in a moment.
Consumer Reports just published a list of other ways that you the insurance customer, can whittle your premiums down:
Switch insurance companies: Most of us tend to pick an insurer and stick with it, instead of playing the field. According to a CR reader survey, consumers who switched said they got better rates and better service. So, make insurance companies compete. CR suggests reviewing your coverage on an annual basis. And to facilitate that suggestion, CR says ...
Get an independent insurance agent: Someone who represents several insurers will make it easier to compare and switch.
Increase your deductible: CR says this could save you $400-$500 a year. The deductible is what you'd pay out of pocket on a claim, before the insurer covers the rest. Increasing the deductible from $500 to $1,000 could bring your premium down by 20-25%. You just need to have money in the bank to cover a bigger deductible if needed, but you might go many years without filing a claim.
