If you want the biggest car insurance discount...get PayPal

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 12:22:00 -0500

The next time you go buy car insurance, there is one thing you need to remember. Paypal!

For this test, we used a profile for someone who is:

26 year old unmarried male
2009 Honda Accord EX Sedan with no anti-theft features.
Our starting point total was $418.00 every 6 months

Then we went through the typical car insurance discounts that you can get:

Get a sex change from male to female? After all women pay a ton more right? Well not exactly…that only lowered the rate to $405.
Get a $40 alarm? Well that alarm will have to last for 10 years before it pays off…because that alarm will only lower your rate by $2 to $416
Get a kill switch? Well this is cheap if you do it yourself…but it’ll take you 4-5 hours to do it. And the net savings? Only $3! So the rate drops to $415
Get a kill switch AND VIN etching? That’s $200 or so right? Well that will only drop your rate $4 to $414
Get the big bang. Spend the $500+ on a lojack. That gotta low the rate big time..right? Not exactly. Getting Lojack will only drop your rate $6 to $412.

An important thing to notice, is that these don’t combine. You get a discount based on the highest level you get. So if you have an alarm + VIN etching + lojack…you still only lower your rate to $412.

So all those discounts are peanuts, and not worth the money.

The biggest discount you can get is PayPal. Telling the company you have a PayPal account will lower your rate by a whopping $43, to $375

So as you can see, you get to save 616% more money on car insurance by having PayPal, than by getting a pricey LoJack system.

Disclaimer #1: For this test we used Esurance quote system, in the future we’ll do a similar test for other companies.

if you have any car insurance questions, take a look at Car Insurance Q&A

Hello World

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:44:46 -0500

Car Insurance Q&A has officially launched today.

We’ll be using this blog to post different information about the insurance industry