Chad Things

As a recent transplant to Chicago, I need to update my auto insurance.  My current insurance is with AAA, which provides decent rates for San Francisco, but I’ve had terrible experiences with them when filing claims – I have a $500 deductible and have had my stereo stolen 3 times over the last 3 years, each time costing me around $1,000 from broken windows and other stolen goods.

When shopping for auto insurance anywhere, here are some good questions to ask insurer. But who wants to spend the time talking calling insurance companies to ask them lots of questions?  I don’t, but I wish there was some organization that did and listed the results. Ideally somebody would make a site like kayak.com but for insurance, having sliding scales for variables.

• insurance.com – claims to check 12 insurance companies, 10 mins on site yielded 4 quotes from esurance, hartford, electric insurance, and AIG direct.  quotes were about the same as Geico (see below).
• insureme – less than 10 mins to fill out forms, resulting in 4 emails, 3 calls, and a web page listing 12 insurance companies … but only GEICO gave a partial quote (had to fill out some more info to get quote), the rest were basically advertisements.  Waste of time.
• netquote – less than 10 mins to fill out form, similar to insureme.  No quotes resulted from this, just more annoying ads.
• State Farm agent emailed, called, and sent me a text.  A bit too aggressive.
• Geico – easy, fast online application, almost half what I paid AAA in San Francisco, and above average reviews on epinions (I only considered companies with 40 or more reviews).

Geico it is.   If you or a family member is in the military, USAA looks good, too.  I found alot of crap advertising and useless sites on my search, but kirtok reviews, squidoo are worth mentioning.

UPDATE 2011-6-5

I sold my previous car, the chadilac jetta, about a year ago and cancelled geico at that time.  Cancelling was super easy – I called and asked to cancel, they asked why, I said i sold my only car, they said fine – we’ll mail you a check.  Done.

Over the last year we were using zipcar, but this week caved in and bought a car again – a 2009 Jetta TDI.  I researched insurance companies again and Geico was one of the cheapest and best around, so we went with it. I”m also really impressed by how good their website is – once you join you can find all the info you need.  Props to Geico !!