We’ve heard of retention offers on credit cards, and people often discuss similar types of offers for rate reductions on cable and internet prices. I recently had an interesting experience with my auto insurance company offering me a $65 discount in an attempt to keep me as a customer…
After being a GEICO auto insurance customer for many years, they recently hit me with a huge price increase from around $650 for 6-months to $1,500 for 6-months. Insane!
Interestingly, when I called a few brokers, each one only worked with select insurance companies. It took a good bit of legwork for me to verify what my options were and to compare pricing. I learned about a regional provider in my area from a Reddit thread, and ended up using that company.
I priced around and found another provider with rates that were around $1,150 for an entire year. So in the end, instead of getting a price increase, my annual cost is actually going down premium. Thanks GEICO for encouraging me to shop around.
GEICO prompts us to call in to cancel. After waiting on hold for over an hour, I learned that it’s possible to cancel via chat as well. That went quicker.
The agent offered to check my price increase and see what she could do. After a few minutes, she ‘found’ a $65 discount which could be applied to my policy.
It was too little and too late, and I ended up cancelling my GEICO policy over the chat. But I found it interesting that there is a small bit of negotiating room on auto insurance where they can apply some sort of discount in order to retain a customer.
I also learned how important it is to shop around with auto insurance. From what I’ve heard, the companies will usually give competitive rates at signup, and then they’ll push price increases at the insurance renewals. So we just have to basically keep switching around every few years to keep the rates reasonable.
(Tangentially, another tidbit I learned in the process is that when the insurer says your coverage is from June 10 – December 10, it actually means that the new insurance expires at 12:01am on December 10th. And so you’ll need to start the new coverage on December 10th, not on December 11th as I had initially assumed.)
Chuck
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