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In poking around the Smart Money Personal Finance website I stumbled upon another one of those X tips for reducing your payment for Y, this time it was six tips for reducing auto insurance ^[3]. For the experienced shoppers in the room, these will be familiar tips but for those of you who haven’t seen this before you can save yourself some big bucks with these six simple tips. To sort of augment the original article, which is a little vanilla, I’ve also listed some previous articles I’ve written about auto insurance to sort of put a “reality check” on some of their tips. You may find tip 6′s addition particularly interesting if you didn’t see the post the first time.

1. Shop Around – Comparison shopping should be a tool in your kit no matter what you are buying, be it a pair of sneakers or auto insurance. In this case, Progressive Insurance is the best at comparison shopping because they do it all for you. For my experience with auto insurance, read these archives ^[4], but you may find these two posts particularly interesting: pre-25 year old insurance rates ^[5] vs. post-25 year old insurance rates ^[6].

2. Get All Available Discounts – They list Combination Discounts, Defensive-Driving Classes, Good-Student Discounts, Retirement Discounts, Association & Group Discounts, College-Kids-Who-Are-Far-Away Discounts, Safety Discounts and Loyalty Discounts.

3. Increase Your Deductible – You’ve heard of those stories where someone gets into a fender-bender and rather than deal with insurance, someone offers to pay out of pocket. Well, how much would it take for you to opt for dealing with the insurance company (and an increased premium)? If you say $500, then your deductible shouldn’t be lower, raise it.

4. Drop Some Coverage – If you had a chance to read some of the articles about my experience, comprehensive and collision represent huge premiums but removing either is very risky.

5. Clean Up Your Credit Report – from the article:

“Somebody who is extremely poor in their payment habits could pay 30% to 40% more than somebody without those problems,” says independent agent John Costello, a partner at Costello Dreher Kaiser Insurance, based in Rochester, N.Y.

6. Get the Right Car – The article doesn’t give you actual numbers to match what they claim (and neither will I, I don’t know) but I will give you this article – which details the ratings State Farm puts on various cars ^[7].

Good luck!