What choice do you have if your insurance company drops you?

Now this is where things would get interesting – if by law in the state of Illinois you have to have car insurance and you have been dropped by your insurance company, what are your choices?

Your choice is to shop your car insurance with other companies for coverage.

Here is where it gets ugly.

In most industries, it is illegal for them to share your personal information. This is not the case with insurance companies – for some reason they can and do share your personal information with each other all the time.

When you have been dropped by an insurance company for too many tickets, accidents or a combination of both, all the other insurance companies have that same information and access to your driving record.

This now makes you a very high risk to the insurance companies. You will have one of a couple choices – find another quality insurance company that will insure you and be at the mercy of what they are going to charge you for insurance or buy insurance from a substandard insurance company.  A substandard insurance company is a company that insures people that are high risk when they can’t get insurance from a quality insurance company.

There are two down sides to having to deal with a substandard insurance company and no upside.

First, they know you can’t get insurance anywhere else and they are going to charge as much as they want to insure you. They can get away with this because they know your driving history and record and they know that, by law, you have to have insurance in the state of Illinois.

Secondly, my experience has been, they pay pennies on the dollar when you get into an accident and they have to pay to fix your car. At my collision shop, I stopped doing business with them about 15 years ago. They are impossible to deal with, never return calls and literally pay about 50 to 60 cents on the dollar of the actual repair cost of a quality repair in today’s market.

My point to all of this is it’s very important to know the status of your driving record and the current relationship you have with your insurance company.