For most insurance companies, you have the choice to choose the amount of your deductible for both your collision and comprehensive coverage.

We have already talked about comprehensive insurance and the difference between that and your collision coverage. Here is a quick review in case you have forgotten.

Collision coverage pays to fix your car in the event of an accident. Comprehensive coverage pays to fix your car in all other incidents. What I like to refer to as “acts of God.”

Some examples for a comprehensive claim are a tree falls on your car, an impact with any kind of animal (deer hits are the most common), somebody vandalizes your vehicle, stone chip damage to windshield, flood damage, etc. I think you get the point.

One more time, I would like to stress how important a police report is at the scene of the incident. This will again give you the proof you need to show the insurance company exactly what happened to your vehicle.

So, if you have a good insurance company, it will let you choose your deductible for collision, which can be one amount.

Then you can choose a different deductible for your comprehensive portion of your policy. This is important for a couple of reasons.

You need to understand that a comprehensive claim will not affect your driving record, so it will not raise your premium. If it does, you need to find another insurance company.

Next, you will be more likely to use your comprehensive, so keep that deductible lower so you don’t have to pay as much.

It also isn’t tied directly to your premium like your collision deductible is. So if you get a stone chip in your windshield, you will only have to pay $100 with a lower deductible than $500 or $1,000, which could be your deductible on your collision portion of your insurance.

Contact your agent to ask what your deductible is on your comprehensive, and lower it as soon as possible. Then when somebody keys your car in a parking lot, it will be a lot easier to handle with a lower deductible.

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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.

A couple of foolish mistakes in a short period of time could cost you a lot of time, aggravation and money over a long period of time.

Next week: The difference between comprehensive deductible and collision deductible – you can choose the amount

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To get back on task of filing an insurance claim or not, you should also be aware that filing a claim that is your fault will almost always have a negative impact on your insurance premium.

When the accident is your fault – in today’s world – the insurance company is going to raise your car insurance premium 95 percent of the time.

Fifteen or 20 years ago this wasn’t the case. You might be able to dodge this bullet if you have been with your insurance company for a very long time and haven’t had any claims, but in my experience it is rarely the case.

Any accident that is your fault will increase your payment. I would like to take a moment to reinforce where we started, which is the scene of the accident. You can now see why it is so important to ALWAYS call the police when you have an accident, especially if the accident wasn’t your fault.

This scenery gets worse every time you have an accident. To give you an example, with the insurance company that I currently have if I have the first accident my insurance premium with go up 10 percent for three years.

If I have a second accident in that same three-year period, my insurance premium with go up another 30 percent!

Now can you guess how much it will go up if I were to have a third accident in that same three-year period?

The answer is they would drop me from their company!

Next week: What choice do you have, if your insurance company drops you?

And be sure to check out my Facebook page at www.facebook.com/louiesharp.sharpautomotive