Cheap Car Insurance - Why Choosing the Right Insurance Company Matters  by Peter Main

When buying car or auto insurance most people have what probably could be termed a bottom-line approach. They will have an idea of the type of cover they want, and they will shop around normally to obtain the cheapest quote they can, and that will be pretty much all they worry about.

This in part is because no matter where you live some type of car insurance is probably compulsory, and people's attitude to an extent would be to obtain what is necessary because of the legal requirements, and not worry too much about anything else.

The issue of the solvency or not of any insurance company is something that probably does not raise any concerns from most individual policyholders. This is understandable, but is nevertheless an important issue that should be considered by people.

There is a tendency to assume that most insurance companies will always exist for a long time, are solvent, and can be relied upon to meet any claim that might be due.

The solvency or not of an insurance company is not necessarily the main issue, although it is an important one. The insurance claims that really matter to people are the long-term liability claims, where a motorist or driver will have a significant amount of financial damages awarded against them or agreed in an out-of-court settlement, which the company will effectively cover for the policyholder.

This is an important consideration, simply because most liability claims take a long time to settle, and you want to make sure that the insurance company is still around when the final settlement was agreed.

There may be some provision in statute to provide some compensation if the insurance company goes bust meantime, but this may well be restricted to whatever the local state or federal minimum legal insurance requirement is.

If your insurance company is not able to meet its commitments to you as a policyholder, you are still liable for any damages that are due from you. As such the solvency of an insurance company is important and something that should be considered by potential policyholders.

The other issue that affects the choice of an insurance company at a more practical level is its approach to claims management, both at a personal level and at a financial level. This is more than simply about whether it pays claims quickly or efficiently or not.

Car insurance can be slightly different to other types of insurance in that claims will often be for partial repair or damage as opposed to a total loss of whatever the insured item is. This means in practice that insurers can use their own vehicle repair shops, and their own claims management systems to ensure a speedy or not repair service.

The difficulty often is in finding out actually how effective an insurer is in dealing with a claim both fairly and quickly. In one sense it to be easy to find out nowadays given the nature of the internet and how willing people are to post examples of good or bad service.

In reality, rather like customer reviews of products bought online, people tend to take to a website to have a good moan about a company or express their dissatisfaction with it some reason.

This may be a perfectly valid complaint but inevitably will be one-sided. It is unlikely that insurance companies or even people who experience a good level of service with an insurance company will take to a website to recommend their car insurance.

This means simply that other ways have to be found of checking out how an insurance company deals with claims and there are a number of ways of doing this.