I write to you today from the Land of On-Hold Music, where I’ve been for the better part of an hour while trying to understand why my car insurance premiums have suddenly doubled, despite last getting a speeding ticket in 1999 and last being at fault in an accident in 1992. (Are Texas rates really that much more obscene than the rest of the world’s?) It’s always good to know that age and sex discrimination is still alive at least one place in the world, in the insurance industry, where being a 26-year-old male means I must be constantly teetering on the edge of automotive death and dismemberment.
Note to bands everywhere: You should not include cell-phone ring-tones on your albums. It is not nice to people with CD players in their cars and cell phones in their pockets.
I just dropped Kelly at the airport, bringing a sad close to a very enjoyable weekend. We saw a bunch of bloggers Friday night at the Inwood, which meant Kelly had a good opportunity to share embarassing stories about my life circa 1997-2000. Other weekend highlights (sorry, my connection is too slow to dig up links): a trip to Fort Worth for the Stockyards and the Amon Carter Museum, seeing Sexy Beast at the newly opened Magnolia Theater on Lemmon, heading to the Meridian Room, the wonders of weekend brunch (at the Dream Cafe and Nuevo Leon), and too much gelato.
4 thoughts on “post-kelly weekend”
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allstate has good rates.
Dallas has the highest auto insurance rates in the worls – especially for a male your age.
Auto Insurance is my thing. I have spent many hours writing letters to my insurance provider, talking to people on the phone, researching the Alabama department of insurance, Federal Highway Administration and the evil National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), following National Motorists Association http://www.motorists.org/) initiatives, fighting tickets and in general trying to understand where all my money has gone over the years. My insurance company has never had to pay out a claim for me and yet my rates were twice as much as other people.
It is very difficult to negotiate rates with your insurance provider. Their rates are sort of fixed by the department of insurance (Although California is the big exception to just about every insurance thing). If you fight with the company over your rates they will tell you their rates are fixed by the state governments. Then if you call the state govt. department of insurance (I’m not sure who handles it in Texas) they tell you that the rates are submitted to them for approval and the insurance companies come up with them. It’s very difficult to hold anyone accountable and I haven’t figure out the trick yet.
What’s even better is if you pose scenarios to the insurance company like “What if I was married and got X type of car with Y safety features” they have a hard time telling you how that will affect your rates because the sales people don’t necessarily have access to that statistical pool data. The rates aren’t set based on *your* driving patterns, they are set according to your risk pool. Your pool might be based on the fact that your hair is blond and your skin is white and having nothing to do with driving skill. They defend this behavior by saying it would be impossible for them to assess risk based on actual criteria that factor into driving like your response times. A bit of a straw-man argument if you ask me.
If you really care about your auto insurance rates you need to join the NMA http://www.motorists.org/), begin fighting all your speeding tickets, and perhaps if you are really motivated read some civil engineering texts about road safety. It’s amazing how many speed limits ignore the results from the traffic study, or illegal stop signs that are installed, or stop lights that have incorrect amber timing. You might also be amazed at how unsafe many of our roads are because communities ignore a century of civil engineering science in order to increase municipal revenue (Which is illegal in Texas BTW. If a municipality gets caught artifically setting lower speed limits they get fined. Small towns in Texas have been busted, almost literally in the financial sense, for doing this) or city councils respond to citizen complaints about noise.
What pissed me off initially that my Texas quote for six months of insurance was almost exactly the same as my Ohio quote for a full year. THEN, after I bit the bullet and paid up, they sent me another letter in the mail saying my sky-high quote had been artificially LOW and that I had to pony up another $200. So I called and yelled and after 45 minutes on hold they told me that there had been a mistake and that I’d erroneously been lowered from their top customer category to the next rung down. Argh.