During the pandemic, many of us have depended on shopping apps more than ever before. If it wasn’t already clear that online shopping and home delivery have become a fixture in our society pre-COVID, it certainly is now.
But is buying online the best solution for everything? Insurance is one thing we’d recommend shopping for the old fashioned way.
It’s all about the risk
Every insurance company, whether you use an agent or browse online, is going to need to know what kind of risk you are to determine how much to charge you for the insurance you’re seeking. To make this determination, they need a ton of personal information from you:
- Names
- Date of births
- VIN numbers
- Household members
- Marriage status
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Street Addresses
- Mortgage companies
No matter whose website you are on, high-tech aggregators suck you in with snappy names, cool graphics, and claims of big savings. What you tell them gets disseminated everywhere under the guise of “marketing.“ Your information is sliced, diced, and resold. You just wanted an idea of what your premium might be and now you have 50 calls in voicemail and 66 emails trying to sell you something you might not even need.
Instead, picking a few local agents to interview (internet listing, chamber of commerce, referral from a friend, Yelp or the yellow pages) will get you a much more efficient and manageable search. Your information will be protected by a real person’s efforts to give you the best solutions for your pocketbook.
An agent will help you determine how complicated your insurance situation actually is. What other areas of risk should you be looking out for? Is there a price benefit for putting all your business with one insurer? Often these sorts of services cannot be addressed in an online session.
A good insurance agent is an advisor first and a salesperson second.
