Forty percent of families have two vehicles or more and they can easily place them under one policy and save money. Multi-car insurance policies are usually cheaper because carriers offer 10 – 20% discounts for combining automobiles in a household under one policy. Some companies like Progressive don’t even require people to be related as long as they live and register the autos at the same address.
Many vehicle insurance companies offer cheap multi-car policies and State Farm, GEICO, Nationwide, The General, Amica and Country Financial each offer around 20% discounts. Liberty Mutual, Progressive, Safeco, The Hartford and Travelers offer around 10% savings.
If you need more than 4 vehicles included, you may want to talk to GEICO or Progressive as they may allow up to 8 cars in one policy. Most others allow at least 4 cars.
And most states would allow stacking of Uninsured Motorist and Personal Injury Protection coverage that reduces costs or allow people to have more coverage if they need to. While people are allowed to stack coverage, they can total up their protection. For example, if you have two policies with $50,000 limits, you can use up to $100,000 Personal Injury Protection or UMC, if you need to.
All these advantages reduce costs and make multi-car insurance policies cheaper, while the flexibility allows more people to take advantage of these offerings.
Families can easily find the cheapest insurer for this option and everyone benefits from it, as discounts can reach up to twenty percent for choosing a multi-car insurance policy.
The two key conditions are that the vehicles must be registered at the same address to be included and they all must have the same level of liability coverage with most companies. But they can have different levels of physical damage coverage.
It is not hard to see why many companies readily offer cheap multi-vehicle insurance policies considering they will be able to insure several cars at once that will reduce administration costs. This naturally increases the company’s reach too. Usually, motorists tend to stay with auto insurers they know and some of the family members will still remain with the provider even if they leave home.
Motorists enjoy the ease of administration as well since they have only one policy and company to deal with and one renewal date. Besides, companies are more agreeable to various adjustments like excluding drivers when they insure the other car and driver as well.
Easy management isn’t really a good enough reason to go through all the troubles. You should make sure multi-car insurance is cheaper to make such moves worth it. The savings will depend on how many cars and drivers are involved but you should expect at least 10 – 20% overall savings. Of course, if it is only one driver, who can only use one vehicle at a time, the premium should be lowered substantially.
Probably, the best starting point is to find out the costs separately and together first. Occasionally, one driver with bad records can influence the costs substantially that it may make sense for such person to keep a separate policy. For example, someone with a DUI on record can be expensive to insure and adding such person on your policy may not be preferable.
So, you should get several quotes and look into the possibilities and advantages. Families can still get auto insurance discounts when they switch all their policies to one carrier, where each vehicle would have its own coverage independently. But they wouldn’t probably save as much as a multi-automobile insurance policy.
Of course, bundling other personal lines like home and auto is another viable option and it can work with the products described above too. If you are going to move all your policies to one company you want to make sure that you get the best overall deal. That is why you should shop around and compare companies, coverage and costs carefully.