Internet Marketing

You may want to believe insurers are hot competitors and never talk to each other. Except you would be wrong. There’s a steady flow of information into two central databases. The bigger and more important is called CLUE (Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange) with the smaller competitor called A-PLUS (the Automated Property Loss Underwriting System run by Insurance Services Office Inc) which collect a broad range of information about you and how you relate to insurance companies. This is not just details of the claims you make. A range of factors are combined to produce an insurance score. This parallels the work done to create a credit score, and both scores are used by insurers to create a risk profile for you and set insurance rates. So, for example, both organizations record when you ask for clarification of your cover even though this does not result in a claim. It even records whether you are late in paying any of the premium installments. There’s also a positive effort made to collect public information about you, e.g. whether you are involved in litigation, have judgments against you, are subject to foreclosure orders, and so on. If any of this information is incorrect, it could mean you are only offered cover at high rates or you are refused cover. Because of this, many states have passed laws to give you basic rights. You will usually find your local rights set out on the site run by your state’s Insurance Commissioner.

The CLUE reports are sold by LexisNexis and provide information about all claims relating to your home or your vehicle. The key problem is that, if the score is very low, it could cause your home address to be blacklisted. While this might be an accurate assessment of your risk profile, it would do a significant injustice to anyone later buying your home. As an aside, all the information is stored for not less than five years so insurers use your history of claims to assess the risk you will file another.

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is supposed to help you by requiring insurers to tell you when they share your information with anyone else, except CLUE reports are excluded from the Act. This brings us to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) which does apply equally to credit and CLUE scoring. You have the right to ask LexisNexis and ISO Inc for one free copy of your insurance report every year. If you find any inaccuracies, you are entitled to have them corrected. If you feel the response of either LexisNexis or ISO Inc is unsatisfactory, you can insist a note is included in your file explaining your views. Unfortunately, you have no right to opt out of this sharing arrangement. Your insurers are entitled to continue sharing this information.

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According to the Book of Common Prayer we often leave undone the things we ought to have done. It’s a fact of life. In many ways, we are our own worst enemies. Yet, for most everyday purposes, there are no penalties. We do the things we left undone when we have the time. We might never actually catch up with the backlog, but we keep moving forward. Except there are times when the failure produces instant consequences and, no matter how hard we try, it’s impossible to go back and put it right. Let’s be clear about this. The majority of traffic accidents could be avoided if everyone followed the rules of the road and kept a proper lookout. But we are easily distracted, multitasking when we should focus on the driving. This leaves the insurance companies with a bill and a problem.

In a no-fault state, it does not matter whether the insured driver or the others involved were negligent. The insurance company pays out regardless. But this only applies in twelve states. The remainder rely on the law of tort which order the party at fault to pay compensation to the other. So, if you were not at fault, your insurance company collects the compensation from the other driver and, in theory, suffers no loss. But if the other driver was not insured or underinsured, or you were at fault, your insurer now faces a loss. If this was just down to the math, the insurer would calculate a “fair” premium rate increase and slowly recover the loss. But if the insurer put up the rate every time one of its drivers was at fault, many of those drivers would move to a competing company. So the math has to bend to match social considerations. Sometimes, the insurers have to accept the loss. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not always easy to pay insurance premiums. There are always more expenses and never enough money. Use these hints to squeeze extra cash from your budget and afford premiums. Even if one tip alone doesn’t generate the savings, several combined will.

#1 Carpool to work and to do shopping

Gasoline costs most households nearly $1500 a year. Monthly, there is a national average of $368 spent on gas. If you reduce your gas use by even a third, you will have saved a big portion of your premiums.

The easiest way to do that is to share the commute to work and/or do your grocery shopping with a friend or neighbor. Two commuters halves the price you pay for a ride to work. Three commuters means you only pay a third. Load up those vehicles to really save on money.

The less you drive, the less you pay in premiums. If by carpooling you reduce your annual mileage significantly, you could really reduce your premium levels.

Find carpool partners online using these nonaffiliated sites:

• GoLoco (the Facebook of carpooling)
• Craigslist
• eRideShare

You can also just post something on the boards at work.

#2 Cut back on luxury expenses

By luxury, we don’t mean beach resort vacations or diamond rings, although you could definitely cut back if you are buying that stuff willynilly! What we are talking about are non-essential purchases.

For instance, rather than going to see a movie on a Friday night, have a night in with family and friends. Play a board game or tell stories. To save money, make it a potluck dinner, rather than paying for it all yourself.

Are you a big coffee drinker? Maybe you don’t need to drink so much. In fact, green tea can be cheaper than coffee and better for your digestion and blood pressure as well. If you usually hit Starbucks at some point in the day, bring your coffee from home in a thermos instead.

You can definitely eat in more, and get more calories from nutrient-dense staple foods, such as brown rice or whole grain bread and pasta.

#3 Part Time Work

Extra income never hurts, and it doesn’t even have to mean taking on a shift at the local fast-food restaurant or anything. Some people make a lot of money by picking things from garage sales or thrift stores and reselling them online for more. You’d be surprised by the quality of things that people get rid of and how much it can go for on eBay! Read the rest of this entry »