The insurance agent work-around: Buy insurance direct from the company.
With a bit of research, you can save money on insurance by avoiding buying from agents, Hamm writes.
With a bit of research, you can save money on insurance by avoiding buying from agents, Hamm writes.
In many ways, I feel the same way about insurance agents as I do about financial advisors.
In both cases,聽most of the people in the business are really good people.聽They鈥檙e out there doing what they can to make their customer鈥檚 situations better. One of the people I respected the most growing up was an insurance agent, in fact; he was one of the true pillars of the community.
In terms of what they actually do,聽most agents provide very solid advice to people who are unsure about what to do.聽They can help people dig through their financial situation and figure out their best moves. This can be particularly valuable for people who are uncomfortable without a guide to help them navigate their financial situation.
贬辞飞别惫别谤,听sticking only with agents can cut off your options a bit.聽Most large insurance houses sell policies directly to the public, bypassing local agents. In many cases (in my experience, it鈥檚 been most cases), the policies that the insurance houses sell have slightly better prices than what the agents are offering, though not in聽all听肠补蝉别蝉.
Buying directly from the company does reduce the amount of assistance you get.聽You鈥檙e going to have to know what you鈥檙e doing and do the research on your own to get the right policies if you鈥檙e doing it yourself.
The reward for that move is usually lower insurance premiums. Even if that doesn鈥檛 turn out to be the case, at the very least you鈥檙e giving yourself more options for comparison shopping.
The challenge, of course, is that you have to do all the homework yourself. You have to be able to find out about different policies, understand your own financial situation well enough to choose appropriate policies, and then go out there and get those policies.
Between the local library and the internet, it鈥檚 easy to gain access to all of the information you would ever want about insurance policies. There are countless books and websites that detail all of the information you鈥檒l ever need. One good place to start is聽The Bogleheads Guide to Investing.
The next step is to connect this information to your finances. Many guides to insurance (like the one linked above) will walk you through this process and help you figure out what types and values of insurance you might need.
After that, it鈥檚 merely a matter of shopping around for quotes. You can certainly get quotes from local agents, but with this info in hand, you can also get quotes directly from insurance houses.
The more options you have for shopping around, the more money you can potentially save. It鈥檚 a customer鈥檚 world out there and you deserve to be taking advantage of it.
This post is part of a yearlong series called 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap (Revisited),鈥� in which I鈥檓 revisiting the entries from my book 鈥�365 Ways to Live Cheap,鈥� which is available聽at Amazon聽and at bookstores everywhere.聽