Car insurance companies will use just about any and all information that they can get, in order to assess a potential client's insurance risk. What they are actually looking for is any indication that the person acts in a responsible or irresponsible way. Obviously, having a record of fender benders is direct evidence that the client is likely to have accidents in the future and as a result a possible bad risk. After this they are then looking for none traffic related irresponsible behavior and in a lot of cases they will look at the credit ratings of their possible clients.
This would seem to be a very strange idea especially if you are paying for the total thing up front and not using credit or monthly payments. But, they are just looking at the reliability issue and, if you have been in monetary trouble before, they extrapolate this to the possibility for irresponsible behavior on the road.
Insurance companies get the ability to check on your credit situation during the application process. As soon as you give your social security number they can then get to your credit score. In particular they will be looking to see if there are irregular or late payments. They then assume that this lack of organization will cross over to your driving abilities and therefore you will be involved in more accidents or get more traffic tickets.
There are a still a number of things that you can do in order to help the situation, if you think a poor credit score is affecting your ability to buy car insurance.
1 The best thing to do is to fix your credit score. This does take time, but the results could be good in many areas of your life. You should make sure that you pay bills on time or possibly early. Stop using credit cards if you know you haven't got the cash to pay for the items and instead save up for them and pay in cash. This may even enable you to get discounts on things. You could also get another job to help pay of money you owe early or seek professional financial advice.
2 Some companies don't check credit scores and don't ask for social security numbers as part of their personal data. You should try and get quotes from this type of insurance company. You can also look at companies that specialize in higher risk customers such as those with traffic tickets and a lot of accidents in the past.
3 If you are already insured you might find that threatening to leave them for another company might be enough to get them to reduce their premium. This is especially the case with the recession times at the moment.
4 Look at your credit score and the reasons for it. You may find mistakes and you need to make sure that these mistakes are fixed before you go on to get more insurance quotes.
In the end, if you have a bad credit score and find that your insurance costs are high you should work hard to try and restore your low credit score, even if it takes a while to do so.
If you are looking for insurance companies that are more sympathetic to people with problems getting car insurance then you should definitely look at Timo Vincent's web site. Especially if you want to save some money
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