March is when we owe USAA our auto insurance premium. This year, it was topping $500/6mths for our two cars (after all the discounts!), and I don’t think it should be. We have never had an at fault accident, and Dad has only had one moving violation in the last 3 years (it was adjusted from “speeding” to “failure to obey posted sign” – no points). Dad’s car still has collision on it, because it’s a difference of $1/mth, so we might as well. Mine has collision as it’s financed still. I removed the rental car option – we *can* survive on 1 car, and hopefully, it’s the “other guy” who’s paying for the rental car anyway. I also raised our deductibles to $1000 per vehicle. We have that money in our emergency fund, and it saves us about $50/6mths. It’s also the highest deductible allowed, so I can’t reduce it any further.
I also looked at our homeowner’s policy. It had us replacing the inside contents of our stuff at a 75% of home value rate – over $355k of “stuff”. I can’t imagine how we would spend that much on the interior items in our house, it’s *maybe* $100k-$150k. I was able to lower that coverage to 50% of home value or about $250k. It lowered our premium by about $50/year.
I *almost* changed our deductibles as well. We have a $2,000 deductible for both options (“wind & hail” and “other”), and I considered raising them to $4,500 – tied to home value, it will always be 1% of the home rebuild value. It would have saved us another $500/year. The only reason I didn’t do it was that our emergency fund would not be able to take two car deductibles *and* the homeowner’s deductible at the same time. We’d need another $1500 in our emergency fund to do so. By the end of this year, I hope to have a lot more than that in our emergency fund, so I will likely raise those deductibles then. We could raise them as high as $10,000, which may be a consideration as we have more and more savings to self-insure.
How often do you look at your insurance premiums and coverage to make sure you’ve got the appropriate amount of insurance for you?
I wish I could say we review these annually. But the truth is that we only review them when we get a nudge to do so, like with good posts like these! I’ll give our insurance guy a call to review our options.