How do I compare auto insurance companies?

Most people don’t think about insurance until they get a bill. However, when you get a bill do you find yourself wondering, “How do I Compare Auto Insurance Companies?” There are insurance companies that have great TV ads. There are also companies that have boring ads. Do the ads matter? Is price the most important part of insurance? Do I need to stop daydreaming while they tell me about deductibles, limits and a bunch of other gobbledygook?

It’s now easy to compare car insurance companies. Just click the button below. We provide a rating of your auto insurance company compared to three of the best insurance companies in your state.

Three Reasons Why You Should Compare Auto Insurance Companies

Yes, it’s important to compare auto insurance companies. Here are three reasons why:

Advertisements.
Protection.
Price.

Advertisements

Don’t get suckered in by good advertisements. No matter what they say, it’s meaningless. Advertisements are paid propaganda. They’re designed to get you to spend your money. Advertisements are not designed or intended to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Yes, it’s true, money spent on advertisements is money that will never be spent to make an existing customer happy. Be wary of companies with a big advertising budget.

In 2019, the three largest auto insurance companies — State Farm, GEICO and Progressive — spent a combined $4.8 billion on advertising. This is absurd. At ValChoice, we promote using that money to do a better job of protecting customers.

Protection

This is the dirty little secret about insurance that used to be hard to know. Not all companies are the same when it comes to paying claims. Until recently, information was never reported on how well companies perform when it comes time to pay a claim. We would argue that this is the most important point to pay attention to when you compare auto insurance companies. After all, what good is insurance if it won’t pay a claim?

I learned about this issue first hand. The reason ValChoice grades insurance companies is because my life was turned upside down when multiple companies would not pay my medical bills after I was hit by a car. Experiencing the life changing reality of insurance companies refusing to pay claims led me to dedicate my life to the mission of bringing transparency to insurance.

Surprisingly, these were companies that had good reputations among consumers. You may ask if that’s how they do business, why do they have good reputations. Here’s why. When insurance companies settle disputed claims, the settlement is often contingent on the unhappy customer signing a confidentiality agreement. This prevents other consumers from finding out about the egregious behavior of the insurance company.

Price

Without getting additional quotes, the price quoted is out of context. Here’s why. Most people can save money on auto insurance simply by switching companies. There are two reasons for this. First, some companies charge loyal customers more. Second, the new company will often change the coverage in order to present a discount. Therefore, you need to comparison shop. Also, you must to know how much coverage you need and get all the quotes for the same coverage.

For a baseline on what’s a fair price for your car insurance, use our car insurance calculator. It’s free. It’s also interactive so you can see how each input affects the price. Just click the button below.

Here are some of the tricks to look out for when comparing price. How long is the price good for? Some companies quote six months while others quote twelve. What’s the deductible amount? Meaning, if something happens, how much do you owe? What’s the maximum liability the insurance will cover? Some companies routinely cover several hundred thousand dollars of liability while others will not cover more than the state minimum amount. The state minimum amounts can be as little as $10K, which doesn’t go far if someone is hospitalized. Are medical payments covered?

These points may sound complicated, but they’re not. If you get all quotes to represent the same coverage, comparing which is the best deal is easy.

How to Compare Auto Insurance Companies

You’ve come to the right place. Comparing auto or home insurance companies is finally easy. At ValChoice, we do the hard work for you. We collect millions of data points and analyze them to asses how companies price their products, how well they protect their customers when something happens and that person or family need their insurance to kick in and how good their overall service is.

The analysis we do is based on the highest quality data available. Equally important to using high-quality data is the business model of the company doing the analysis. Our business model is setup to ensure there are no conflicts of interest. There are no investors in our business that are in anyway affiliated with insurance companies. We don’t take money from insurance companies, then determine how good they are (we call that pay to play). Nor do we have a mechanism where insurance companies can negotiate their score. Believe it or not, models like those stated above are the norm for businesses and websites that compare auto insurance companies. Our approach is pure and it’s analytical.

Click the button below and we will compare your car insurance company to three of the best companies in your state.

The good news for consumers is that in most states there are several options from which you can buy high-quality insurance. Best of all, it’s roughly the same price as the poor-quality insurance.

What You Need to do Next

Would you rather skip comparing car insurance and just shop with the best companies? We can help with that too. We list the five best insurance companies in every state. Just click the button below for auto or home insurance and find who the best companies are where you live. It’s really that easy.

The ValChoice lists of the best companies is unlike the best other companies name. Here’s why. ValChoice doesn’t list the companies with the largest advertising budgets and the biggest payments to affiliate marketers. No, we’re not doing this to get rich. Instead, we list the companies that score best. That probably sounds odd to anyone reading this. Well, it should sound odd. We’re the only company we know of that takes this approach. That’s why our list is unique. What we know — and want you to know too — is that there is no correlation between a large advertising budget and being good about paying claims. In fact, usually it’s the opposite.

Note: ValChoice does not receive any form of compensation from insurance companies for presenting them as a good option in our car and home insurance reports.

About Dan Karr

Dan has been a CEO or Vice President for high-technology companies for over 20 years. While working as a Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales for a technology company, Dan was seriously injured while commuting to work. After dealing with trying to get insurance companies to pay his significant medical bills, or to settle a claim so Dan could pay the medical bills, he became intimately aware of the complexity of insurance claims. Dan founded ValChoice to pay forward his experience by bringing consumers, insurance agents and financial advisors easy-to-understand analysis needed to know which insurance companies provide the best price, protection — claims handling — and service.