Geico

I got our auto insurance renewal paperwork in the mail today and was taken aback upon reviewing said document to find the folks at Allstate had been billing us a surcharge for non-standard auto insurance. Here's a brief history...A few years back when our crappy cars finally gave out on us, we chose to use mass transit to toodle around town for a year. We live in the city, it seemed a perfectly reasonable and cost-efficient decision. As a result, we canceled our auto insurance. If you have no autos, it follows that you should not be paying for auto insurance. About a year later, when we bought Olive (i.e., the Nissan Sentra) and ordered Sophie the Great (i.e., the Mini Cooper), we had to pick up auto insurance and were punished with a higher premium because of our year away from cars. This policy is stupid. Not driving for a year isn't going to make you a worse driver - in my case, riding the bus effectively erased all previous bad driving habits and eliminated the proclivity for road rage I had been developing since my aggressive teenage years behind the wheel. Stupid, bad policy.

So, I called our Allstate agent to see about getting the surcharge removed. We had been with them for nearly three years so it hardly seemed fair for them to continue charging us for not previously having insurance. And you know what he tells me even though we currently are considered preferred clients, he needs our permission to check our insurance score again. And checking isn't a guarantee he'll be able to do anything for us. I told him to forget it, then I hung up and hopped online. First stop, Geico.

Geico's tagline is "fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent," but you know what? Fifteen minutes saved us forty percent. That's right. And now, I love the gecko. I was able to call back our agent and calmly inform him that we were canceling our insurance with their company as of 6 March. When he called back a few minutes later, he got Darren, who told him we wouldn't appreciate a call in a year to see if he could get our business back. Yeah, thank Allstate, but no thanks.