If you don’t already know this by now, it might come as some welcome news to learn that insurance companies are flexible on the premiums they charge their clients. This means that with the right information at your disposal, you can work the system in your favor and enjoy paying lower rates while this should naturally not affect the quality of the coverage you get.
All of this applies to homeowner’s insurance as well, particularly since this makes for one of the longer term insurance services around.
Shop around, extensively
This is about more than just shopping around to perhaps find the best quotes, but rather reviewing sites like Consumers Advocate.org and shopping around so that you can arm yourself with the right information which will come in handy to help you successfully reduce your homeowner’s insurance premiums. It’s never about the lowest rates automatically making for the best option to go with, but rather about the rates-to-coverage ratio.
Look, you’ll probably be paying insurance premiums for your homeowner’s insurance for a long time to come yet, typically as long as you’ll be paying off your mortgage, so there should be no rush in the process of finally deciding which homeowner’s insurance option to go with. Chances are you’ll want to keep enjoying coverage once your bond is fully paid off as well in any case, but that’s something to think about when the time comes.
When you shop around, extensively, you get to a stage where you can place a much more accurate valuation on each aspect covered by each homeowner’s insurance policy you’re offered. You’ll be able to tell if the premiums you’re offered are inflated perhaps or if they’re selling you short.
Most importantly however, when negotiating your terms with the insurer offering you the policy (which you must definitely do), you’ll be negotiating from a position of power, armed with some real-world examples by way of quotations which you can use to negotiate better terms. Nothing gets an insurer’s salesperson to sit up and notice quite like telling them you’ve been quoted better terms somewhere else. I suppose it’s an unrelated but equally relevant matter, but that’s how I personally got my insurance premiums reduced for my motor vehicle coverage.
The salesperson might go out of their way to find something to cite as the reason why your new premiums will be reduced, just so that they can cover the fact that they generally charge way too much in the first place.
Get your own quotations
Unlike with other types of insurance coverage, such as motor insurance perhaps, homeowner’s insurance isn’t a high-volume game, so the traditional brokers who operate quotation-based businesses aren’t as focused on this market as they are on other types of insurance. That’s why you’ll have to go direct in your solicitation of quotations, and that is fortunately something your real estate agent can most definitely help you with. Chances are you can get homeowner’s insurance from the bank which is financing your mortgage, but even in that case you should still shop around so that you can negotiate better rates.
