Quote:
Originally Posted by Ryan Coke
With us not using our vehicles as much right now and looking for ways to minimize unnecessary expenses, I’m considering removing insurance from one of our vehicles. Now, and when I have done this in the last, insurers seem reluctant to actually take all insurance off, but instead keep fire and theft on it, which then minimizes the savings (it’s about 40% of the policy cost).
The car will be kept in the garage, and really I think I’m fine taking the very low risk of it being burned up or stolen.
So I’m wondering what others thoughts or experiences are on if it is reasonable to fully remove it, then reinsure it once things get back to normal. Or if is should keep the partial coverage on it for reasons I’m unaware.
We do have another vehicle that would stay insured in my name.
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I work as an insurance broker and can give advice to the best of my knowledge:
1. Payment Deferrals - all the companies we write business with have been flexible with making payment arrangements at this time. You can either ask for a 30 day extension or get your next payment deferred and applied equally to all future payments. The other option is moving the withdrawal date to the end of the month, for e.g. - if your payment comes out on Apr 5th, get this payment deferred and move the withdrawal date for all future payments to the end of the month (30th, 31st) to enjoy an extra three weeks of no payments. (Tip - be careful with doing this with Wawanesa, because their billing system is terrible and you can get double-charged.)
2. Reducing Usage - probably the best way to save premium is reducing the annual and commute kms for all vehicles on your policy. Get them to reduce annual kms to 5000 and commute to 0 (provided you are not driving to work daily). This should bring about significant savings but remember to increase them back to what they were to avoid any trouble in case of any future claims.
3. Reducing Coverages - Parking insurance (or fire & theft) is still the best option for people with multiple vehicles on their policy. Since most of us are only driving one vehicle for now, leave the cheapest insured vehicle on the policy as your daily driver and tell your broker to put the rest on parking insurance. You can delete the vehicle too and always request them to give you a quote for either, but there are a few things to worry about when you completely take the vehicle off the policy: first is no coverage in case of any loss, second is you will lose multi-vehicle discounts (for e.g. if you delete the 2nd vehicle, the first one will become more expensive), third is when you try to re-add the vehicle in the future, you will be rated at what the cost of insuring the vehicle is at that time, not what it was at the time the vehicle was originally added).