House Insurance Comparison

It’s astonishing how many old wives tales are still floating around about the ‘facts’ regarding your car insurance rates. For example, did you know that red cars cost more to insure? Collision coverage will cover a head on with a tree? And smoking in the car can kill your chances of getting cheap car insurance?

Car insurance companies have been trying to debunk these myths for years, but they’re still floating around out there. Ladies and gentlemen, I won’t say it’s impossible, but I will say that it’s pretty improbable that your car insurance company is going to put much weight behind your smoking habits when they’re calculating your car insurance rates (if they bother to ask at all). You can rest easy.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that smoking is a financially sound decision either! Have you seen the cost of a carton of cigarettes these days? You could probably fill your gas tank for what the tobacco industry is charging you, and that’s saying a lot! Just putting that money away into a bank account for a year or two can give you a hefty down payment on the kind of car that’s going to cause your insurance company some real concern.

There’s also the small matter of your health and life insurance premiums. Studies show that smokers have a life expectancy that’s ten years shorter than their non-smoking counterparts, which means life insurance companies are going to be paying out their benefits ten years earlier than they would normally expect to. If you’re under 35 that’s probably not going to have a major effect on your rates, but if you’re older than that you can expect to see the cost of your coverage go up dramatically.

Tobacco use has be linked directly to cancer and emphysema and indirectly to all kinds of unpleasant medical conditions, so health insurance companies tend to look twice at policy holders who count smoking in their daily to-do list. Health care costs enough already. You don’t really want to add to that, do you?

What about your homeowners insurance? You do have homeowners insurance, right? Whether you’re renting or buying you need to be covered by a good insurance policy, and that insurance policy isn’t going to be happy if it ends up paying out an insurance claim because of a house fire caused by a carelessly tossed cigarette butt. Smoker related fires cause an average of 1,000 deaths a year. Home insurance companies really don’t like those numbers, and they’re going to charge you more for your coverage to compensate for the amount of money they’re going to (potentially) be paying out on your behalf.

Insurance companies are all about potential.

Since smoking has the potential to lead to financial disaster (even without impacting your car insurance) quitting would be the best thing you could do for yourself. Trust me, your checkbook will thank you.