Friends of ours keep saying how they are switching from their traditional car insurance (companies such as Farmer’s, State Farm, etc) to the online insurance companies like Geico. Whenever I hear this, I cringe. Many years ago, before we were married, my wife and I were in a very serious car accident. She was driving my car; she had insurance through Geico, and I had insurance through State Farm. Since we live in a no-fault state, both of our insurance companies were involved. State Farm made things very easy for us; they assigned a dedicated claim agent to our case, and she was even nice enough to come to my home more than once to discuss the progress of the claim, and make sure things were going smoothly. Geico was nothing but trouble — it basically took three months to get them to issue any checks. In these three months, we were making repeated phone calls to try to get the right paperwork from them, and one of the largest problems we had is that we never talked to the same person twice — any time we called we were forced to explain the whole situation again. We eventually had our lawyer start writing letters, which got things moving with them.

I’ve also found that the online “competitor’s pricing” that companies like Progressive offer are not accurate at all. They usually tell us that State Farm’s prices are at least twice what we are actually paying for our insurance.

For me, the possible savings offered by these online-only companies is not worth the hassles that happen during a serious accident. We’ll stick with a company that we know will take good care of us. What do you think?