I was off this week and one of my chores was to call around to see if I could get any less expensive insurance for our house and car. I noticed that my monthly insurance payment from Johnson's Insurance had crept up to $450 which covered my Optima with son as second driver and our house. Do the math and that comes to about $5,400 a year.... which seemed like a LOT. My initial investigation showed I was paying $2,088 for the house insurance, $1,369 for my car insurance and $1,486 for son plus a 3% fee for monthly deductions which actually only comes to $5,100. Maybe where son got on my policy late they had to bump up the monthly deductions.
In any event, recently having viewed a nice Anthony Insurance commercial about savings I decided to give them a call. After giving some info to the very friendly sales consultant she gave me a quote of $1,034 for house insurance.......... my initial reaction is that she must have missed something or I forgot to tell her about something so I read her the coverage right off my existing house insurance. Sure enough her quote was accurate, and less than half what I was currently paying for house insurance.
We were off to a good start, then we were on to the car insurance. After about five minutes of answering questions she came back with a quote of $1,084 for me and $782 for son. Which means I would save $989 a year on car insurance. Again I found this difficult to believe so I checked my current policy to make sure I wasn't missing anything.... and I wasn't.
After getting both these quotes I had to call somewhere else to see if either Johnson's was extremely high or Anthony was extremely low. I called Steer's insurance and their quote was very similar to Anthony so it seems like Johnson's is very high.
One of the things I liked about Anthony is that if you give them your drivers license numbers and home policy numbers they do your claims history check for you, Steer's wanted me to get my own claims history and drivers report which would have cost me $30. This little extra is what made me decide to definitely go with Anthony. Anthony also don't charge for monthly deductions whereas Johnson's just started charging 3% extra for that service.
There was a minor snag with our wood pellet stove but once I sent them pictures and certificate of installation everything was good on that end. Other than that it was smooth sailing. I called Johnson's to give them a chance to lower my rates but they just said they checked my policy and there was nothing they could do. They had always provided me with good service but for $2,000 a year there is no way I could not switch! I had to pay a penalty of $60 to end my policy early but it was well worth it.
So my new policy is in the mail, when it gets here I will provide an update if there is anything noteworthy. If you are currently insured with Johnson's or if you just seem to be paying too much it does pay to call around! I saved $2000 a year for a 15 minute call!
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