Why do we need insurance quotes?

Quote comparison sites are everywhere these days. You can't spend five minutes online looking for information on insurance without running into a couple of quote comparison sites. Moreover, they usually carry some basic information on insurance so it's a good place to start your comparison shopping with. But before the insurance industry has branched out into the Internet quotes were also intensely used by insurance agents and brokers. So what are insurance quotes for and what are the advantages for the regular buyer in using insurance quotes?

There's nothing really special about quotes since they serve the purpose of ordinary price tags for insurance products. However, unlike the typical price tags on most products quotes allow to reflect the individual and variable nature of insurance rates. Let's just look into the process of getting a quote - you'll instantly get the general idea and the difference from ordinary prices. Every time a person quotes with a given insurance provider the insurer requires a set of variables to be specified. In case of car insurance these variables include car make and model, driving experience, violations, your age, sex and education, location and other additional factors. By putting all these variables into a specific formula the insurer gets the final rate they can offer you in return of insuring your vehicle. As you may guess, for each person the rate will be different and it will require the calculation to be performed over and over again. Not to mention that each provider has different formulas with different weight of every variable, which makes the results even more complex.

Why insurance companies use floating individual quotes instead of fixed prices, you might ask? Because it would be a bit discriminatory towards certain groups of drivers to impose uniform prices on services. Some drivers are more reliable and are less likely to file claims while others have aggressive driving style and higher probability to end up in an accident. Insurance companies prefer insuring low risk drivers and if the driver is high risk he or she is charged with higher rates to compensate for the higher cost of insuring them. That's why car insurance uses floating individual rate system rather than fixed prices.

What does this all mean from the driver's perspective. Quotes certainly offer many advantages to most drivers especially those who are less likely to end up in an accident. By using quotes each driver can find the optimal policy in terms of price and conditions, so it's definitely important to use quotes when looking for a new policy. Moreover, due to the fact that all companies use different methods of calculating their quotes a driver can find better offers from a particular company if another company offered higher rates. This also allows higher risk drivers to find suitable policies with companies that don't put a strong emphasis on the specific factors that are "weak points" for such drivers. It's a manifestation of pluralism that provides all types of drivers with adequate insurance for their money.