Shopping Around For Insurance

After 15 years of paying premiums to Allstate, I have finally started the process of shopping for a new insurance company.  I can’t say I’ve been unhappy with Allstate but it’s time to see if they are truly giving me a good deal or not.  A couple things have caused me to do this.  First, I’ve read too many times that you should do some comparison shopping on your insurance once in awhile.  I’d say after 15 years, it’s time.

The second reason I’m shopping around is because of a massive insurance claim I handled for my parents over the last 1.5 years.  In December of 2006 my parents had a massive fire at their home.  Two weeks later my dad passed away.  Once we got over the shock of both of those events it was clear I needed to step in and handle the rebuilding of my parent’s home.  I learned a TON through the process and one thing has haunted me since going through that.  It was early in the process and I had a couple contractors in the house giving me estimates.  As the two contractors wandered through the house they ran in to each other and one said to the other, "I wouldn’t even want to bid this job if it was Allstate."  Yikes.  The other contractor chuckled and nodded his head in agreement.  Between that comment and the outstanding job that Hartford insurance did managing my mother’s claim, I’ve known for awhile that I needed to explore other options.

So I called an insurance agent today to see whether the rates I’m getting and the coverage I have is right for my family.  I gave them some basic information and am waiting for them to email me a quote from 6 other companies, including Hartford.  If Hartford is the same or cheaper than Allstate, I’ll probably switch.  In the end Hartford paid a very large sum of money to rebuild my mother’s home and reimburse her for her lost personal property.  They didn’t try to nickel and dime my mother and were fair about pretty much everything that we asked for.  I think the most amazing thing they did for us was to hire an outside contractor to come in and inventory the 24X60 garage to help us identify all the things that we needed to claim (and believe me, there was a TON of stuff in there).  Other insurance companies might have just told me to fill out the personal property form.  That one decision that the Hartford claim adjuster made to get a "post fire" inventory company to come in and sift through the charred property increased my mother’s settlement by over $50,000.  It’s completely unrealistic to think that I could have sifted through all of my dad’s stuff in that garage.  He had thousands of things in there and I wasn’t in the emotional state to be able to try to identify each and every item.  As it was, I spent way too much time in that burned out structure and it was incredibly difficult because it brought back so many memories.  Having someone come in and document everything that was there was like having an angel from heaven drop in.

What am I getting a quote on?  We currently have policies on our main home, our lake house, both of our cars, a boat (for the lake), and an earthquake policy on our main house.  Needless to say, we are paying a pretty decent chunk of coin for insurance every year.  Getting competitive prices is probably long overdue.