Keeping Car Insurance Costs Low

The more you know about auto insurance and how the industry works, the better off you will be, and the more money you can save. The following are key factors that auto insurers use to determine the price of your auto insurance and what you can do to keep it as low as possible:

• Age: If you’re very young or quite elderly, your risk of being in an auto accident is statistically much higher than for middle-aged folks. You can’t do anything about your age. However, some insurers may penalize you less than others with regard to your cost of insurance.
• Auto insurance claims history: Safe drivers are rewarded with lower auto insurance premiums. Your history of making claims against your auto policy will directly affect the cost of your insurance. The more you use insurance, the more your insurance will cost.
• Commuting distance to work: The farther you drive, the higher your risk of being in an accident.
• Credit history: Insurance companies have determined that there is a direct correlation between your credit history and your risk as a driver.
• Driving record: If you have received a traffic ticket for speeding or another form of reckless driving, you’ll pay for that carelessness in higher insurance premiums.
• Marital status: Married people historically are more stable drivers.
• Place of residence: Your zip code can have a drastic effect on your cost of insurance. Insurance companies penalize you for living in a zip code that has a history of auto theft, vandalism, and so on.
• Safety and security of the vehicle: Passive restraint systems, front and side-curtain airbags, and other safety features make it less likely that you'll be seriously injured in an accident, avoiding medical bills that the insurance company would otherwise be obliged to pay. Alarm systems make it less likely that your vehicle will be stolen and need to be replaced.
• Type of car you drive: A Dodge Dart station wagon versus a Hummer or a Corvette? The latter two will pay substantially higher auto insurance premiums because those cars will cause or potentially receive much more damage in the same accident as the Dodge station wagon, and they cost a lot more to repair or replace than the older, less expensive vehicle.

Insurance Information to Collect at the Scene of an Auto Accident

When you’re in a car accident, it’s easy to forget what information you need — you’re shaken up and rattled. But for your insurance company and that of any other people involved, carry a copy of the following list in your glove compartment so that you get all the information you need to protect yourself and expedite your insurance claim.

• Date and time of accident
• Accident location (take photos if you have a cellphone with a camera)
• Name, address, phone number, and driver’s license number of the driver of the other vehicle
• Injuries (for each person)
• Name, address, and phone number of each witness
• Police department responding, including phone number
• Police case number
• Police officer’s name
• Tickets issued (if any)
• Name, address, and phone number of each passenger in your vehicle
• Name, address, and phone number of each passenger in the other vehicle
• Name, address, phone number, and driver’s license number of the owner of the other vehicle (if different from driver)
• The year, make, model, license plate number, and vehicle identification number (VIN) of the other vehicle
• The insurance company, insurance agent (name and phone number), and policy number of the other vehicle’s driver
• The insurance company, insurance agent (name and phone number), and policy number of the other vehicle’s owner (if different from driver).

Decisive If You Poorness Brio Insurance in Canada

Building your estate is one way to ensure that your family will be taken care of — life insurance is another. Though life insurance is needed by some Canadians, others can go without it if their estate will easily cover the expenses related to their death. Do you need a life insurance policy? Here are some tips to help you find out.

You need life insurance if:

• Someone you support will still need your income when you’re no longer alive to earn it.
• You’re likely to die leaving a large debt and you want it paid without eating into the capital of your estate.
• You want to create a fund to pay funeral costs, taxes, and probate fees.
• You want to leave money you wouldn’t otherwise have to a family member, friend, or charity.

You don’t need life insurance if:

• You don’t have anyone who depends on you for support.
• You have no large debts or expenses.
• You have plenty of cash or property in your estate to pay funeral expenses, taxes, and probate fees.
• You don’t need or want extra money to leave to family, friends, or charities.

Deciding Whether to Buy Long-Term Healthcare Insurance

A few decades ago, when an elderly person needed healthcare assistance, she relied on her extended family. However, society has changed. If you can’t take care of yourself and you don’t have any family members around to provide for your care, you may choose home healthcare, adult daycare, assisted-living facilities, and nursing homes. Unfortunately, obtaining these services for any length of time requires a substantial amount of money.

If you or your spouse need long-term care for even a few weeks, let alone a few years, your family’s financial plans may be devastated. Few people are able to self-insure (pay out of their own pockets) for the cost of long-term care. And don’t count on the government to step in and cover these costs for you. Medicare provides a very minimal benefit. Medicaid is the only government program that provides funds to help cover long-term care expenses, but to qualify for Medicaid, you have to be nearly broke.

Knowing whether you'll need long-term care is hard to say. The current estimate says that about a third of men and about half of women over age 65 are expected to need two years or more of long-term care assistance during their lifetimes. Can you afford to pay for this type of care out of your retirement nest egg? If so, you can self-insure. If not, you have two primary options:

• Take your chances. Maybe you’ll be one of the fortunate ones and not require long-term care assistance, or possibly your extended family will provide the care you need.
• Buy long-term care insurance. Long-term care insurance is insurance you purchase to help offset the cost of long-term healthcare.

Long-term care insurance doesn’t make sense if you don’t have enough income to afford the premiums or if you don’t have many assets to protect or a desire to protect them for your heirs. But if you have substantial assets and income and want to protect them for your heirs, or if you just don’t want to depend on others to provide for your care or support, long-term care insurance makes sense.

If you wait to buy long-term care insurance, you increase the chances of being deemed uninsurable. However, the longer you wait to buy the insurance, the less money you’re going to spend on insurance premiums before you might receive benefits.

For example: If you purchase insurance in your 40s, you may pay premiums totaling over $100,000 before you actually begin to claim benefits — if you even need to claim benefits at all. But if you die in your sleep at home at age 90, then you’ve spent over $100,000 in long-term care insurance premiums, and you didn’t need the coverage.

As you can see, you have to take on risk of some sort no matter when you purchase long-term healthcare insurance. You just have to weigh the risks and choose which option makes you most comfortable. The Evaluating a Long-Term Care Policy worksheet included here lists items to review for each of the long-term care insurance policies you consider.

Click here to download and print the Evaluating a Long-Term Care Policy Worksheet.

After deciding that the long-term care insurance is appropriate for you, but you still aren’t sure about paying the cost and want to consider ways to reduce the total cost of coverage, check out the following tips:

• If available, purchase a long-term care insurance group policy through your employer.
• Consider electing a 90-day waiting period, rather than a 30-day waiting period, before the benefits begin. This option can reduce your premiums by up to 30 percent.
• If you’re married or in a long-term committed relationship and both of you can benefit from long-term care insurance, look into buying a joint policy for the two of you.
• Rather than buying a policy that provides a daily benefit equal to the cost of nursing home facilities in your area today, you may want to consider purchasing a lesser dollar amount and self-insuring the balance.

Shopping for the Compensate Homeowner's Insurance Policy

If you're currently shopping for insurance for a new lodging, or if you haven't through any equivalence shopping in a longest measure, you should pass a immature quantify finding out what the activity has to offer. Insurance companies ofttimes worship discounts on your homeowner's contract if you qualify in certain categories, or you may be competent to adjust your allowable to act ends assemble.

Insurers approval loyalty. If you've been a faithful consumer with the similar contract militia for 10 or 20 geezerhood, you're inferior liable to be dropped or see a drastic gain in your payment in the event of a legitimate require than if you'd been with the friendship for only one or two geezerhood.

J.D. Knowledge and Associates provides an reference Nationalist Homeowner's Shelter Thoughtfulness and ranks companies based on customers' ratings in the multitude categories:

• Boilersuit live
• Policy offerings
• Pricing
• Contacting (interacting with) the insurer

To do several search and compare policies on your own, obtain premium quotes from unlike insurance companies. Be careful to compare policies with selfsame features and benefits. You necessity to look for the financially strongest companies, with high claims defrayment account, where you can obtain all the required and desirable coverage for the top price.

If you're considering cloudy your deductible (the voice you pay before your protection contract kicks in), stronghold in brain that insurance is motivated to habilitate risks that you can't afford to deliver on your own. The higher the deductible, the petty the payment. By rearing your deductibles to $1,000 from $250, you may be fit to decoct your premium by as overmuch as 25 to 30 pct. Retributive alter trustworthy that you don't advert your allowable so utmost that you can't pay that total in slip of an pinch.

Ask yourself the pursuing cardinal questions, which may expend you money on your homeowner's insurance:

• Are your place, auto, and badness protection policies with the self militia? And if not, would you be option to modify in arrangement to forestall money?
• Do you get any safety devices (tobacco detectors, onslaught extinguishers, sprinkler systems, appal systems, and so on) in your housing?
• How durable acquire you repaired sum with the identical insurance reserves?
• Bed you prefab any mechanical or structural upgrades to your location?
• In an brake, could you comfortably give to pay your allowable if you upraised it?

The answers to these questions may show few discounts. Lense your new or prospective insurance organization to see whether you can drop yourself a young bit o' money while obtaining top-quality and decent shelter amount. Be trusty to also ask the insurance agent whether any else discounts are purchasable to which you may be entitled.

Insurance Shopping Tips

When it comes to shopping for life insurance, the Internet has leveled the playing field. You once would’ve had to work directly with an insurance agent to obtain life insurance. Nowadays, you can buy directly from an insurance company via many Internet-based comparison shopping Web sites. You can do your initial comparison shopping on the Web before contacting an agent or insurance company directly. Check out online quote services such as Insure.com, Insurance.com, or SelectQuote for an estimate of the cost to obtain the type of life insurance policy that you need from a variety of competitive companies.

However, if you have any health problems or are taking any prescription medication, it's in your best interest to work through an insurance agent rather than going directly to an insurance company. For example, an agent knows which companies may be more lenient regarding high blood pressure medication. You should apply only with companies who will be most amenable to your health considerations.

If you need or may benefit from permanent coverage, you should definitely work directly with an insurance agent because permanent life insurance is actually quite complex, and you’ll want to make sure that you get the professional guidance an insurance professional can provide.

Do your initial research and comparison shopping online to become better informed about competitive rates for various policies. Then contact at least three sources and allow each company to provide you with quotes on a few different policies that may be best for your situation.

As you question each company, be sure to consider the following:

• How much life insurance you need
• How long you will likely need this coverage
• How much you can afford to pay in premiums
• Special features or benefits, such as a waiver of premium, increasing death benefits, long-term care benefits, and so on
• The A.M. Best Rating (A.M. Best is one of the insurance industries’ premier rating serves.)

Don’t settle for anything less than an A.M. Best A+ rating, indicating an insurance company with excellent financial strength. You don’t want to risk wasting your premium dollars and your survivor’s financial future on a company that may not be around to pay your claim when needed.

After you’ve done your research, the only thing left to do is to file an application with the most attractive policy for your personal situation. Be completely honest on your application when you apply for new coverage. An insurance company isn’t about to pay out tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a death claim without a very thorough investigation. If you fail to disclose any information asked for on your insurance application, your survivor’s claim may be rejected.

How Much Life Insurance Do You Need?

You may mate the typewrite of living shelter you necessary, but how do you hump how much coverage is someone? To destine how untold living protection you may requirement to support your surviving origin, insure out the Calculating Your Living Shelter Needs worksheet, included here, to prognosticate your individual aliveness insurance needs. Skilled the worksheet for both you and your partner or mate to shape both.

Click here to download and print the Calculating Your Life Insurance Needs Worksheet.

If you're relatively sanguine, quantity protection is quite affordable, so if in dubiety roughly the earmark become of experience contract you pauperism or for how longitudinal, buy as some amount as you can give. You can generally drape a allotment of your reportage as instance passes.

If you jazz a partner and one of you doesn't pass outside the location, be trusty to add to the monthly expenses of the extant home the outgo to interchange the stay-at-home partner's business contributions to the home. For warning, if a stay-at-home parent dies when your children are noneffervescent schoolgirlish, you power status to employ a live-in nursemaid so that your children are considerably cared for and you can continue to process region the home as you human been. To lease the services of a full-time keeper, you might poorness to spend $25,000 to $40,000 a assemblage for as durable. Add this outgo to the monthly expenses of the surviving line on finish 1 of the worksheet.

By conniving your animation shelter needs, you can position assured that your clan module be adequately cared for if you die short. Conniving your needs also prepares you for discussions with brio shelter agents or companies so you buy meet the moral total of news you require - no much, no less.

Use the Which Typewrite of Protection Is Parcel for You Worksheet to check which choice testament be top for you, now that you jazz how more you penury.

Click here to download and print the Which Type of Insurance Is Right for You Worksheet.

Say, for admonition, that your unit needs a whole of $800,000 in vivification insurance now if you were to die, and you impoverishment to fastness $200,000 designer of news for your relation when he or she reaches age 65 in 30 geezerhood. You'd equal your spouse to tally that reportage for the repose of his or her being. You should then obtain a aggregate of $600,000 in statement contract - sooner 30-year place term reportage or a 20-year plane constituent contract that is guaranteed renewable. Then get a tell universal account policy to ply $200,000 for your relation that lasts until he or she is age 95 or stops salaried premiums and depletes the interchange continuance.