hereās me, a grown ass adult with a car i paid off like 4 years ago - nothing special, a smallish commuter POS that gets 40mpg that i literally use to drive 4 miles to work and back.
i was paying about $630/year because i pay for a year at a time, and itād be almost double that to pay monthly, like what the actual fuck? anyways, a few months ago i get this email from the insurance company telling me āhey get ready your policy will renew in 3 months, be sure to double check your payment methodā so i log into my account and they were gonna raise my premium to $970/yr and there was literally no obvious way to see that they were gonna do that. it was a case of logging in, going through multiple levels of menus to get to the future policy, download a pdf of that policy, then view it offline.
well, iām pissed, so i call them to find out what the hell theyāre doing and why and they claimed itās because i had gotten a speeding ticket. of course, they had zero information to share with me about that speeding ticket - no ticket number, no date/time, no address, nothing. i sure as hell donāt recall getting a speeding ticket, and in any case, with a spotless driving record, youād think thereād be some kind of interfacing with me about it, but no. they claimed the ticket was real and iād need to contact my DMV to find out more.
so i call them, the DMV, and after some hassle, find out they have ZERO record of any speeding ticket. soā¦ back on the phone with the insurance company and they just wanna give me the shaft and the runaround no exceptions. i mean, iām pissed now because itās OBVIOUS fraud, right? Anyways, i get absolutely nowhere. so i tell them to cancel my policy and i woulda thought about contacting a lawyer about a possible case or something but, nawā¦
i still have the car, and itās parked being unused. I swapped to riding bikes to and from work, sometimes an ebike, sometimes a fixie, and iām the only cyclist on the road around here that Iāve ever seen and itās sometimes really sketchy. but i plan to ride through the winter, dry or snowy, i donāt care.
it can get complicated, because iām a single father, but honestly, fuck auto insurance, fuck cars, fuck car brain. we gotta make a stand at some point and I lament that we canāt really do it collectively.
Iām with you there.
Not too long ago, my company was informed by letter (as you should have been) of a price increase. I canāt remember exactly, but I want to say it was a 600% increase on the companyās rates. Thereās never been any claims on the policy, they just decided they could do it to enough of their clients, and probably enough would pay it that it wouldnāt matter theyād lose a bunch.
I understand the provide we switched to actually provides greater coverage for less than the original amount we paid the first provider. Unbelievable.
It wasnāt specifically for insurance reasons, but I got rid of my car after I noticed I wasnāt driving very far. Now we have a couple cargo trailers and we do the shopping and the errands just as easily and weāre saving tens of thousands doing it. We go through the winter as well, itās not for everyone but dress appropriately and have lights and youāll do great.
Iāve had great luck going through an insurance broker for my insurance. The broker can be a mediator should the insurance company engage in sketchy nonsense, and can get you into some cushy insurance companies than only do B2B and donāt spend millions on consumer advertising. Plus brokers will know what insurance companies to go through for what buyers to likely get you the best rate
My job is shopping around for third party customer support vendors. One of their pitches I kept hearing was, āWe donāt lie to you about times.ā
And then they shared how their competitors were trained on a method of customer service where their goal was to get you to hang up as fast as possible to increase their velocity Metrics. So they would literally lie to you. Thinking it was a joke, I googled and yeah, apparently that was a REAL tactic done for decades.
