Car Insurance And Your Credit Score – How It Affects Your Rates
Reader’s Question:
Why do car insurance applications include questions about for credit history or if you have claimed bankruptcy in the past?
Sarah
Birmingham, AL
There is much debate over the use of credit scoring to determine car insurance rates. There have been similar issues in the past with regards of using age, marital status, sex, etc.
Car insurance rates are not solely calculated based on credit score. There are other factors such as the type of car, where you live, driving record, etc. The purpose of getting all of this information is to correlate the insurance rate as closely as possible with the actual cost of potential claims. That is essential to understand.
Using insurance carrier statistics it is known that motorist with bad credit record historically file more accident claims than motorist with good credit. Credit score may also determine whether an applicant is likely to pay premiums in a timely fashion.
Cheapest Car Insurance Score – How Do I Find Out My Score?
You’ve done everything you can to have the cheapest car insurance premium. You take advantage of discounts, you cut down on your driving, car pool, drive safely. You bought the right kind of car with the right kinds of safety features. So why is it that your car insurance premium rates are still higher than you would think they should be? After all, you’re older than twenty five and married, so shouldn’t you be getting a break by now?
Maybe, but one of the biggest influences on car insurance rates is something that follows many people through most of their lives. The credit score. The credit score is something that you might never have thought of as being a reasonable factor in your auto insurance rates, but the car insurance companies think that it actually does have something to do with driving. Not only are people with better credit scores more likely to be reliable customers who pay their premiums on time and don’t change companies too often, but they also, according to statistical data, file fewer claims than do people with lower credit scores.
Insurance companies take the credit report and make an insurance score out of it. This doesn’t necessarily take into account all of the same factors as does your regular credit score, and is more interested in regular payments than a long history. And these scores are the driving influences of high insurance rates among good drivers.
Their use is heavily debated. There have been lawsuits filed against certain car insurance companies for using these so called insurance scores to decide premiums, and many say that they target low income and minority families, because those are the groups in which people are more likely to have bad credit history. For the moment, now, they must be dealt with.
Cheers,
Fashun Guadarrama.
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