Insurance Goal: Find a Knowledgeable Agent
By Allison Bisbey Colter
You should be periodically assessing your insurance coverage, as much as yearly and whenever you have a major life event.
But just as important as making sure you have enough insurance is making sure there aren’t any gaps in your coverage. That’s where an experienced insurance agent can make a world of difference.
Jack Hungelmann, an insurance agent himself and the author of "Insurance for Dummies," says looking for a knowledgeable insurance agent is a better investment of your time than shopping around for the insurance carrier with the best rates or highest financial-strength rating.
The advantage of using someone with experience is that he or she will know about the pitfalls - the exclusions and limitations -- in a policy. “If you know where these are, you can modify a policy to cover them,” he says. “But you need experience to know what they are.”
A good example is the complete business exclusion in most home insurance policies. That means your home office isn’t covered, so if a UPS deliveryman slips and falls, you’ve got zero coverage. The solution? An amendment to the policy that costs all of $20 a year.
Here’s another example: Say you vacation at a lakeside resort and rent a pontoon or speedboat by the hour, and get into an accident and injure a passenger. It’s unlikely you’ll be covered by either your auto or home insurance. But Hungelmann says an experienced insurance agent can get you coverage for such an accident for “virtually nothing” by structuring the policy correctly.
He says insurance agents vary in their knowledge, just like attorneys, accountants or any other professionals. But unlike attorneys or accountants, you can get an insurance agent with a tremendous amount of expertise for the same price as someone who just got started, because the two agents get paid the same way, via commissions.
The best way to find someone qualified is through word of mouth. “When you ask people for a referral, they’ll usually say, ‘Call Joe, he just saved me $200 a year.’ You don’t want to shop that way. Ask for an agent who’s very knowledgeable.”
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