The world would be a better place if everyone was trustworthy and honest. Sadly, human nature seems to have come with a selfish gene. We want what we haven’t got. We don’t want to pay for what we need. There was a recent piece of research which staged accidents at intersections involving a bus. The point of the study was to discover how many of the innocent people on the sidewalks would run on to the bus and claim to have been injured. Needless to say, the results did not show city dwellers in a good light. So, when people were first working through the basic statistics of assessing risks, it was obvious there was less risk if people drove only a few miles a week. But if they were commuting long distances on busy interstates, the risk of accidents grew high. The insurers reasoned it would be good to pitch the premium rates to reflect the risks. Except how could they trust the drivers to make an honest declaration of how many miles a week they drove? The answer, sadly, was that no one was trustworthy if allowed to self-certify mileage. When insurers ran a trial, asking drivers to bring in their vehicles for their odometer readings to be taken, everyone quickly learned how to wind back the count of miles.

When an airplane crashes, we’ve all been brainwashed into watching the search for the black box. That’s the onboard recording device that captures what the pilots were saying as the plane fell from the sky as well as storing all the technical information from the instruments. We’re told it’s vital to be able to explain why each aircraft crashes. After all, the larger planes carry many passengers and, if one were to crash into a city center, it could do a lot of damage. We all have an interest in reducing the risk of air accidents. That’s why we’re hooked as television cameras record submarines going down to search the seabed to recover these vital boxes and as many bits of the plane as possible. Remarkably, experts rebuild as much of the plane as possible to see more clearly what damage was sustained before the plane hit the ground or fell into the sea.

Sometimes acronyms work really well. They lodge in the mind we’re forever stuck with remembering them like Washington’s self-fulfilling prophesy in the the VOTER Act, i.e. Voting Opportunity and Technology Enhancement Rights Act. Other times, we wish someone had taken out a gun and shot the clever idiot who thought up these mixtures of letters. Well, here comes an organization begging for a bullet. It’s the Insurance Information Institute or III for short. Obviously it was a day when inspiration was lacking.

Nobody gets something for nothing. The only way to get a benefit or save money is by investing effort. More often than not, this means a regular commitment to work. After all, we Americans hate scroungers, condemning the entitlement mentality, and promoting the idea we should all earn enough to pay our way through life. This applies just as much to insuring the vehicles we drive as to all other aspects of our lives. So let’s start with a dose of reality. It’s not often economically convenient to change the state in which we live. This is unfortunate because the average cost of a policy is $789. Actually, it’s probably higher than this but the most recent figure released by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners only comes up to 2008. Anyway, where you live can make a significant difference. The average rate in North Dakota was $500, whereas living in Florida will cost you more than $1,000. Then, depending on your personal characteristics and other factors like the make and model of the vehicle you have chosen to drive, you can find a difference of more than $1,000 in the actual premium rate you have to pay. Just as many are now looking carefully at the packages they buy on cable, this can make it worth your while to look carefully at your insurance policy.

There are some things that we are obliged to purchase so that we could enjoy the benefits of the things we posses. Like in case of land tax for home owners these additional expenses can be both annoying and uncomfortable to the family budget. And one of the most common things that are infamous for being such a disturbance is of course car insurance. Most of us have cars and know how it’s annoying to pay a considerable amount of money just in order to drive a car legally. Sure, there are certain benefits to having your car covered through insurance especially when you have an accident. But the rates most of us are charged with are just over the top. Still, there’s always a very simple solution that will help save your money on just any type of insurance – comparison shopping.