Life With Frenchie

Over the past 6 months, we have turned in our old cars and both purchased and leased a new vehicle. My old car was over 7 years old and I had standard insurance coverage on it. With it being an older car, my rates were relatively low, I guess, and I hadn’t really changed my coverage except to meet state minimums whenever I moved. Once we traded it in for the new SUV, there were other things to consider that I never really thought about 7 years ago when I had made my last car purchase.

For one, I hadn’t really given much thought to what would happen if there were a total loss of the car. Now, since I am more fiscally responsible, I gave that serious thought. What would I be left paying, after insurance, if my car were totaled? I found out that one option was to purchase Gap Coverage, which would cover the difference in the purchase price and the depreciated value of my car. Still, I am cautious about buying any “extras” from the dealer and much preferred the option of purchasing my coverage elsewhere. You know my penchant for being “lazy” and doing as much business online as possible, so of course I searched for insurance quotes online to help make my quote shopping easier to fit into my schedule.

When it came time to insure the second car purchased this year, the problem was that we weren’t happy with the rates we were currently paying. My boyfriend had been with his insurance company for a few years and was certain that he wouldn’t be able to get better rates. I asked if he had checked around before he purchased that policy, but you know guys — they’ll never admit they’re wrong. I tried to convince him that he probably could do much better if he just got some quotes. He didn’t believe me, so finally I showed him that he could get better car insurance rates just by filling out a quick online form and getting quotes from multiple carriers. At least he believed the Internet, even if he didn’t believe me! One of these days, he’ll learn.

Sponsored by www.advantageautoquotes.com.

Being an “actuary in training”, you’d think that I’d have my insurance needs in order. Huh! You don’t know me very well, do you? Over the past year, El Presidente and I have been co-mingling more and more of our finances. Most recently, we have updated our auto and homeowner’s insurance policies. While finalizing these policies, we started thinking about the other areas of our lives that were not covered. The biggest gap was life insurance.

I guess this was just overlooked since, in the past, I usually was covered through my employer’s group plans. This being the case, I am really only familiar with Term Life coverage. I never really thought any further on the subject beyond opting to receive the company provided coverage. Now that I am not receiving life insurance, I have started to look into it a little more and have realized that a term policy is probably not suitable for my needs.

Once again, my limited actuarial skills are not enough to make me anywhere near an expert on what to consider for life insurance, so I looked around and found a site to get insurance quotes online (I LOVE the Internet!). Luckily, I found a site that not only gave you estimated quotes from multiple carriers (all of whom I recognized), but it also gave me more information about the different kinds of life insurance policies, like whole life.

I still have a lot of poking around to do to figure out which way to go, but being able to do it all in one place sure makes the task a lot less daunting.