Why You Need To Shop Your Auto Insurance ASAP

J.D. Power does surveys on customer satisfaction in a variety of different industries, but they have noticed a huge shift in trend, a huge shift in direction, and it's how people feel about their auto insurers. In short, people hate them. I mean, hate them. And it wasn't always like this. Why do they hate them? Well, what do you think? What the insurance premiums are for auto insurance has gone up and up and up and up over the last many years. Huge double-digit increases year after year. And so people, one of the things J.D. Power found is that for the first time really ever, people are shopping their auto insurance. I saw an item in Kiplinger about a survey done by another organization, LendingTree, that found that not quite 100%, but almost 100% of people who shopped around saved money by shopping around and switching their auto insurance. And two-thirds of them saved a substantial amount of money. What to them was a substantial amount of money by shopping around. And why is that? Because insurers are facing much higher costs to insure you and me. Number one, we don't drive. I mean, clearly, there was a change in psychology and behavior in how people started driving during COVID. COVID was such an upsetting event for so many of us psychologically. And then the roads were much less crowded. And people became very aggressive drivers, taking out their frustration and anger over the restrictions in life and all that during COVID. They picked up some really bad driving habits. And now the roads are full again, more full than they ever were. And we brought those lousy new habits onto the roads. Accident rates are up. And even though road design and vehicles are much safer than they used to be, fatality rates, after declining year after year after year, stopped declining. The injury rates have been stubbornly high. I.e., insurance gets more expensive. And then the cost of repairing vehicles became more expensive. And now it's going to see another big boost because of tariffs that are affecting auto parts and vehicles. I mean, it's a bad story in multiple ways. But in the midst of that bad story, what individual insurers are charging is even more glaringly different than it was pre-COVID. So that's why you need to shop around. That's why people are motivated to shop around. Remember, two-thirds of people who switch saved a substantial amount of money switching. They got that other issue, the quality of insurers. And that's a hard dilemma for me to answer because there are insurers who year after year have shown to offer much far superior customer service during a claim cycle or non-claim cycle than others. And so you're the one who has to weigh that, being with an insurer that rates very, very, very highly for service to their customers versus others that are more mediocre. And when the chips are down, might not really do a great job for you. That's going to be your call. And then there are things we can do to reduce costs. Do you know insurers are seeing a significant increase in the number of claims for hail? And I was reading something that just made so much sense to me. A lot of people live in a situation where you don't have a garage, but you can buy these prefab carports really inexpensively to put your car under that might, if you live in an area that's subject to having a lot of hail damage, you could potentially use one of these kit, whatever you call them, prefabby kind of, because you see me, Krista, trying to install, self-install a prefab carport. That's why I can't even describe it. That is not something you would want me ever involved in. Sometime soon, I got to talk about my latest project of trying to build something in six easy steps.