Are there other factors that affect auto policy premiums?

Claims alone don’t trigger increase in insurance rates, there are also few other factors that may influence your insurance premium. Some of the factors may be directly related to you and some may not be.

Here are few other common reasons why your premiums might go up:

• Receiving a traffic ticket: Your receiving a ticket, may not pose any threat to the insurer, but that definitely makes you a risk. Tickets for traffic violations reflect carelessness in your driving and hence insurance companies see you as higher risk which means higher rates for you.
• Too many claims paid by the insurance company: You may not have been the claimant, but the insurance company might have paid a lot of money over claims made by other policy holders. In such a case too, your premiums might go up. You may not have anything to do with this, but since there had been too many claims made by other policyholders, the insurance company may decide to increase the rates of every policy holder in their company.
• Adding a new driver to your policy: Each time you add a new driver to your existing policy, your rates will go up. Irrespective of what age the driver is, or the driving record, your auto rates will go up. If the new driver is a teenager or someone with a not so good driving record, companies make greater increase in rates.

Posted by admin on Friday, December 24th, 2010. Filed under Auto Insurance, Auto Insurance Policy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry