My Afternoon

It must be old age . . little things seem to take forever and aggravate the heck out of me.

Probably from about 2000 to 2014, we had Liberty Mutual Insurance for our houses and cars. They seemed reasonable and from time to time, we’d compare rates but they were always the lowest. There are only about four companies I’ll do business with so I didn’t call some companies that I know are probably lower but I just don’t want to deal with them.

Liberty Mutual has a discount for Georgia Tech alumni but in 2014, when we compared rates, another big insurance company (we’ll call them ABC Ins. Co.) had lower rates so we switched. Chad also had Liberty Mutual because he’d been able to get the Georgia Tech discount because he was associated with our policy. I told him he should check with ABC in MO and he did and their rates were quite a bit lower so he switched.

A couple of weeks ago we got our homeowner’s policy and it was well over $2,000, which was about 35% higher than it had been. Remember, we have a very small house so $2,000+ seemed outrageous. I began checking around, called Liberty Mutual and several others. One never bothered to call me back (a local agent!) one had higher for the cars and lower for homeowner’s but in the end, the total was about the same as ABC. But, Liberty Mutual was about $400 per year less on the house.  Liberty Mutual was about $30 higher on the umbrella policy. They gave me car quotes . . which I think was about $780 for all three cars. We only have full coverage on one vehicle. I hadn’t received the bill for the cars from ABC yet but it came today. I opened it and it was $776 so I was thinking we were only going to save a net of $370 by switching . . was it worth it to stick with ABC or switch back to Liberty Mutual. 

Then . . I looked at the bill from ABC for the vehicles and it for six months so twice a year we have to pay $776. That made it over $1,100 we’d save by switching. That’s huge! Same exact coverage. Same exact deductibles.

We had Liberty Mutual in MO when a lady hit me. She had insurance, then she didn’t have insurance, then she had insurance . . it went back and forth and after about a week, Liberty Mutual said “We’ll pay! You don’t need to be going through this. We’ll treat it as uninsured and deal with her.” I was happy with the way they handled the claim.

I called ABC to make sure the vehicle insurance was, in fact, for six months. Yes! I told her we were going to switch back to Liberty Mutual. She was so sure the coverage wasn’t the same. It is. I called Liberty Mutual to make sure everything was the same. Yep . . it is. It’s hard to believe that one company is exactly half the other company’s premiums but . . it is.

I started working on it all as soon as the mail came . . about 2:00 p.m. and when Vince walked in the door at 4:30, I had just finished. 

We actually ended up with a bit better coverage because with ABC, in order to get lower rates, we had agreed to sign a waiver that they would not have to fix cosmetic damages (mostly hail dents) on our metal roof and Liberty Mutual covers dents if we want to pay the deductible to get it fixed. Also, we’ve never had rental (or whatever they call it) to pay for a rental vehicle if our car is damaged in an accident because we’ve always had an extra vehicle but now that our extra vehicles are 16 and 21 years old, I think I’d rather have a rental if something happens to my car so I went ahead and got that on the Highlander.

Here’s where I need your opinion . . I wasted an afternoon but I saved $1,000. I should be rewarded with at least $300 to spend on yarn, don’t you think?