Steps that save you money on insurance

Everyone can stand to save a little extra cash every month, and one of the best ways to get extra money is to reduce your monthly bills. You can easily cut down your insurance costs, especially those for your home and your car, by following a few easy steps.

Ask around

Get quotes from several different insurance providers to see if switching companies can help you reduce your monthly costs. Chances are, you haven’t updated your insurance in awhile, so it’s about time to get fresh prices. Go online and enter your information and you’ll receive a quote from each provider. When you get the different prices, you can choose the one that makes you the best deal or bring it to your current provider and ask them to match it.

Comparing prices is your best opportunity to lower your monthly insurance costs, but make sure you are comparing apples to apples by checking exactly what the payment quoted includes. If one company gives you a very low price, but also cuts a lot of the services or raises your deductible, it’s not a true comparison.

Look into special discounts

There are hundreds of discounts out there for insurance, and it’s important to research the different possibilities and then ask for those discounts from your provider. For your car insurance, try to get discounts through your employer, check if you qualify for good-driver price reductions, or see if they have a cheaper plan for students. Use one company to insure several items and you should get a lowered rate. For your homeowner’s insurance, look into the emergency services nearby (like fire stations) to see if that will lower your payment. Do a little searching online to find out if there’s some other discount you could qualify for. A little bit of time could save you a significant amount of money every single month.

Raise your deductible

Insurance is to protect you if something goes terribly wrong, but insurance providers make money because more often than not, it doesn’t. If you raise the amount you have to pay in the event of an emergency, your insurance costs are lowered and you get to save the difference. If you have less coverage, though, you need to be prepared to pay out of pocket if there’s a problem; you must always be sure you have access to enough funds to pay your deductible without having to go into debt and pay a high interest rate.

If you take a few minutes to do a little research and find what kind of a plan would be most comfortable for you, figure out what discounts you are eligible for, and get price quotes from several different companies, you can save yourself hundreds to thousands of dollars on your insurance. That money can be put towards savings, paying off debt, or big goals that you are trying to fund. Especially in these economic times, every little extra you can save is important, so put some time and effort into saving yourself some cash.

Gina Hamilton is an insurance consultant and content contributor at Kanetix®. All the most popular providers are included, such as Whitby Kanetix.