Keeping Your Insurance Current
There’s nothing worse than letting your insurance lapse and then having an accident. You should get into the habit of paying all your bills on time, but when you’re short you should also have other ways to stay current, like using a cash advance. Whether it’s health insurance, car insurance, or life insurance, you want to stay current on insurance policies so that you don’t inadvertently have a gap in coverage.
Learn to Manage Risk
Life insurance is about managing risk to your family. If a breadwinner passes away, how will the surviving family members get by? If you pay your life insurance diligently up until a few months before you have an accident, all those premiums mean nothing if your policy has lapsed. If you’re going to take the trouble to manage risks, you should also find a way to manage the possibility that you may be short some months and find ways to pay the premium, regardless.
Automatic Withdrawals
One of the best ways to make sure your policy premiums are always paid on time is through automatic withdrawals. Of course, you have to have the money in the account when the bill is due, but even that can be managed with some creative financing. Once you know what date the automatic withdrawal is to take place, you can move funds from other accounts, schedule a payday loan, or borrow money to make sure the bill is paid. It’s better to make the premiums a priority than to risk the potential for a lapse in coverage. While an insurance policy is optional, other types of insurance coverage, like car insurance, are mandatory. In that case, if you don’t pay your insurance you not only risk loss of coverage, but also the DMV can pull the registration. Before you decide to opt out of insurance, think about the consequences if you do. It’s almost always better to pay the premium, than it is to have the policy canceled due to non-payment.
Choosing a deductible for your auto insurance quote might seem like an easy task, but it is actually a very big decision that should not be taken lightly-especially since your deductible has a big effect on the premium you are charged and because you must have enough money in the bank to cover it, should you have an insurable incident.
A deductible is the amount of money that you need to pay out of pocket toward damages on your vehicle if you suffer an insurable event like an accident or car theft. Deductibles are only paid when you have damage that is covered by your insurance policy-otherwise, all damages will come out of your pocket or that of the person responsible for causing the accident.
Because a deductible must be paid out of your own, personal funds, it is important that you choose a deductible that you can actually afford to pay. Otherwise, you might end up with a deductible that hurts your savings, results in additional debt and prevents you from being able to get your car in working order. Without a car in working order you could suffer other financial difficulties such as the loss of a job.
It is tempting to choose a high deductible when shopping for auto insurance quotes because the higher your deductible is, the lower your auto insurance premium will be. Since accidents don’t happen to most people very often, it can seem like a real waste to pay for a high premium each and every month. But as tempting as that might be, ask yourself this-does it really matter? If you have a cheap auto insurance premium every month but you can’t afford the deductible, then you are switching one difficulty for another.
Instead, choose a deductible you can afford-one as high as you can afford-and then enjoy the resulting premium. That way, you will take advantage of as cheap a premium as you can get, you will have the comfort of knowing that you can afford your deductible if something should happen, and you won’t feel as though you are throwing away money on a policy that is not providing as much benefit as you need.