Extra safety features are often very inexpensive upfront and mean long-term savings on insurance premiums.
Before getting these features, talk to your insurer to make sure you will get a discount.
We have provided a price efficiency rating to let you know the ratio of upfront cost to insurance savings. The higher the price efficiency rating, the sooner you will make up the cost with insurance savings.

Add On Headrest

Protects against whiplash, head, neck, and back injuries. This is essentially a foam pad that attaches to the front of your headrest. It will allow you to rest your head while driving, rather than having to keep in hovering 6-inches from the rest.

Right now, your options are either to hold your head hovering without rest or to sit completely erect at a 90-degree, L-shape.
The add on headrest is an elegant solution to that problem that will really save your neck in a crash. Independent studies have proved it!
Plus, driving is just more comfortable.

Price Efficiency Rating: 7 – Will become higher as more insurance companies do their own studies on its effectiveness in reducing injury.

Signal Mirrors

These side mirrors flash LED turn signals so that it is clearer to other drivers that you are turning. There will be fewer collisions this way. Plus, the LEDs are very energy efficient, long-lasting, and cute!

Price Efficiency Rating: 5 – Installation can be pretty costly.

Child Car-seats

Getting the right child safety devices in your vehicle can save you big insurance money. If you ask your agent to recommend a car-seat, they may actually be able to offer you a discount because they know your child will have a much smaller chance of injury and death.
If your child’s improved safety isn’t a big enough reward, the savings will be!

• Rear-facing seats are best, but never put them in front of an active frontal airbag
• Do not incline seats more than 45 degrees
• Connect all the straps and harnesses correctly
• Pay attention to the expiration date on the car-seat

Price Efficiency Rating: 5-9 – Getting the best seat money can buy is better protection for your child and saves you more in the long run.

Sensors and Cameras

While these futuristic features are commonly thought of as expensive add-ons for luxury vehicles, they are becoming quite inexpensive as people and insurers realize they have huge safety and savings bonuses. As more statistics become available, insurers are seeing the proof that these features really do prevent many crashes and collisions, which means bigger discounts and lower rates as you get into fewer incidents.

• Lane-departure warning
• Front-collision warning
• Blind-spot detection
• Electronic stability control

Price Efficiency Rating: 5 – Once costs come down, this efficiency rating may well soar to a 10! For now though, it may take a year to recoup costs. However, if it saves you from a collision, which it very well might, you’ve instantly got your money’s worth.

Car Insurance Quotes

If your current insurance provider doesn’t give you significant discounts for extra safety options, consider switching. Car insurance quotes will help you find a more affordable provider. You can even compare policy details and rates from the best insurance companies in minutes using online car insurance quotes.

Urban sprawl never used to be an issue. Even though the latest development might be miles from where you work or the nearest shops, this was never a problem. Most families owned two vehicles. Some three or more. No-one walked. Everyone just jumped in the nearest vehicle and off they went without a second thought until the price of gas rocketed up. Now we have the credit crunch and a recession just bottoming out. Car ownership has become an expensive proposition. Too expensive for some who have been reborn as a one-car family to cut their losses. The first step in crisis management is to find out which of your vehicles is the cheapest make and model to insure. Now balance that against the likely costs of maintenance and repair over the next twelve months. And which will sell for the highest price? When you know which vehicle you are keeping, maximize the number of discounts on the policy, including bundling auto and home together with the same insurer. Except, one vehicle for a busy family may not be practical. What are the options?

Many families talk to their neighbors and work out a carpool. This is reasonably easy to organize for routine journeys. But there is one slight problem. If you are going to carry passengers, you should have insurance to pay their medical costs should they be injured in an accident. It is not safe to drive your neighbors around on the state’s minimum liability cover. Then we come to the always difficult question of sharing the costs of the gas. If the passengers always pay something towards the cost of the journey, many insurers treat this as a business arrangement and require the vehicle owner to take out a commercial policy as a taxi. Needless to say, this turns a friendly social service into an expensive excuse to argue with your neighbors over prices. Of course, you could all agree to lie about the arrangement. But the stories can change rapidly if everyone ends up in a hospital and big bills are presented.

The second option is the new rental plans which site vehicles for rent by the hour in local garages. You book what you want over the internet, travel to the garage for the pick-up and drop it off at the same garage when your time is up. The cost per hour on the standard plans are attractive and, assuming you do not want a vehicle more than an average of one hour every day, you will save money on car ownership. But you do need to look carefully at the insurance offered in the standard plans. Some have poor cover of medical expenses for you as the driver and passengers. Others do not include the loss of use charge if the vehicle is off the road being repaired. Always read the small print. Summing up, finding insurance for a single vehicle means getting multiple car insurance quotes and finding the one that works for you. If you are going to use your car to drive neighbors around, you also need to get car insurance quotes to cover the additional liabilities. If you use one of the new rental plans, consider paying extra for LDW which gives more comprehensive protection against loss.

One of the more annoying features of the insurance world is its habit of distilling options down to simple sets of letters and then failing to clearly explain what the letters mean. In other words, insurers hide behind jargon and prefer not to explain clearly what you are buying. You are expected to assume the insurer has your interests at heart and pay over your money without a second thought. In many cases it works. Over the years, we have given up the unequal struggle and just say prayers we never fall sick. But, as premium costs have risen and the recession has cut back our spending power, trying to understand the options is back on the menu. So let’s start with an explanation of HMOs and PPOs. In fact, they both rely on a network of physicians, clinics and hospitals, but they differ significantly in the detail of how they deliver healthcare to you and your family.

A Health Maintenance Organization (HMO) is a network of healthcare professionals that enters into a contract with an insurance company. The insurer offers a captive group of people to refer to the network and, based on the expected volume of business, the network agrees a fixed fee for all the main services on offer. In theory, this works well for everyone. The fees are discounted because of the volume of business, so the insurer saves money and charges lower premiums. This is usually the cheapest form of health plan with very low copayments and, often, no deductibles. But there are problems. HMOs are very reluctant to accept people with existing conditions requiring expensive treatments. They prefer most of their patients to be reasonably healthy. The reason is basic economics. Every physician has to meet a quota of patients in a day. This means spending the shortest possible time on each consultation. Long diagnostic sessions disturb the quota and can result in penalties to both the doctors who miss their numbers and the patients who have slowed down the queue. There are also significant restrictions on patient choice. A nominated primary care doctor decides what referrals shall be made and to whom. HMOs are the cheapest form of care, but you have little control over the treatment you or your family receive.

A Preferred Provider Organization (PPO) uses the same basic approach but, because you pay more, you buy greater control over the treatment. The copayments are around 20% and there are usually deductibles. But, you have freedom to choose your own doctors. So long as you go see a physician in the network, you are covered. If you want to see someone outside the network, you usually only pay the difference between the network rate and the actual fees your choice collects.

So, when it comes to cheap health insurance, an HMO is the better option. But if you have the money and a health problem likely to need more extensive treatment, you should opt for a PPO. It always comes back down to your own personal needs and what you can afford. Cheap health insurance always comes with limitations. Read the small print before you buy into any plan and see exactly what you can and cannot do before you agree to buy the policy.

The easiest way to understand how an insurance policy works is to think about gambling. You are about to drive your vehicle out on to the public roads and you make a bet with the insurance company. If you can do this without having an accident, you lose the premium. If you have an accident, the insurance company pays your losses. So, as with a field of horse about to set off round the track, the bookmakers check the records of each horse. How many times has it run and placed. This gives them a basis on which to set the odds. In theory, everyone has access to the same information so you decide whether to place the wager depending on the fairness of the odds quoted. Well, it’s exactly the same with drivers. The insurers make a risk assessment of you as a driver. What make and model are you driving? How many miles a year do you drive? How many years of experience? How many tickets and claims? This profiling gives them the odds of an accident and the company sets the premium rate to quote you. You also know your own track record and have a good basis on which to decide whether to pay the premium.

Unlike a conventional bet, you can decide to self-insure a part of the potential liabilities. This is done through the so-called deductible where you pay the nominated amount before the insurer has to contribute. So if the claim against you is for $800 and you have a deductible of $1,000, you pay the whole of the $800. But if the claim is for $1 million, you only pay $1,000 and the insurance company loves you like a brother. The majority of traffic accidents are minor fender benders and the repair costs are usually low. If no-one is injured, self-insurance is a cost-effective option, i.e. the amount you save on the premium covers the likely payments of claims. But you should consider the issues carefully before accepting the maximum deductibles. Suppose you have a bad run of luck and, in the space of a year, you are involved in three accidents where the claims exceed the deductible. Now you have to find the deductible multiplied by three as a cash sum and your premiums will go up because you have proved yourself a bad risk. Can you afford the pay this lump sum without breaking the bank? Given your premiums are going to rise, do you still want to pay the maximum deductibles in the future?

Planning is all about the worst case scenarios and hoping for the best. There are good discounts for increasing the deductible. There are also good discounts for insuring more than one vehicle or combining both auto insurance with home insurance. Because you cannot guarantee you will never have accidents, you should decide what discounts you can find and how much you are prepared to pay if the worst happens. Do not simply buy the cheapest car insurance you can find. In many cases, these policies do not give a good value-for-money cover against liabilities. Shop around and buy the policy that gives you the best protection at a price you can afford.

The distinction made by the insurance industry is between term and permanent life insurance. So you either buy a policy for a fixed term of years which then expires, or the policy is “permanent”, i.e. it usually stays valid and enforceable during your life. The other elements of permanence cover the premium rate which can remain the same throughout your life and the terms of the policy which continue to apply regardless of any change in your health or other circumstances. Never liking to leave anything really simple and straightforward, the industry then divides policies into three basic types. The first is the so-called whole life policy which many consider the most appropriate because the insurers tend to offer minimum guarantees. Why are guarantees useful? For someone aged in their twenties, it is difficult to predict what will happen over the next fifty years (allowing for the average life expectancy). Despite the fact that stock markets have shown steady growth over time, this is partly due to inflation. The buying power of the dollar today will be worn away by price increases, so the numbers representing stock values have to keep rising to keep pace. This is not an increase in real values. It simply prevents a loss of value. So, if an insurer today guarantees you a minimum rate of return over your lifetime, and that rate is better than inflation, it looks a good deal to take it. Better the known than the unknown.

The second type of policy is the universal which offers more flexibility, allowing you to vary the amount you pay into the fund according to changes in your financial circumstances. When you are new to the world of employment, pay is low and so you start with a low premium rate. As your pay increases, you increase the premium rate. If there is a family emergency, you can elect not to pay for a period of time. The key difference is that a whole life policy collects and adds dividends to the cash value, whereas the universal simply pays interest on the cash in hand. Despite this, there are minimum values guaranteed but they tend to be lower than the guaranteed amounts in whole life policies. The third type of policy, the variable, appeals to those with a higher risk appetite. It gives you more control over the investments. Some insurers do offer you guidance on investment strategies, but the price of your management is you take responsibility for generating the returns. The insurer does not give anything more than a token guaranteed minimum for the benefits payable to your dependents.

As suggested in previous articles, the promise of growth in cash value, whether through investment or the payment of interest, is something of a smokescreen. When you are going through the life insurance quotes to decide which policy might represent the best buy for you, do not focus on the investment opportunities. Analyze the life investment quotes to find the policies offering permanence on the best terms. What you should consider is the possibility of problems with your employment. Is there a way you can keep the policy in place if you cannot afford to pay the same level of premium? Some allow you to convert the policy to one fully-paid-up, using the cash value to buy future years. Others allow you to suspend payment for a period. Since your main purpose should be protecting the interests of your dependents, keeping the policy in place is the most important factor.