Hey, does the air bag in this thing work?

If you’ve ever shopped for a used car you are probably a pretty savvy buyer after the experience was over. But did you check the air bag? It turns out that airbags are a quick and easy part for thieves to remove from the car. And since few buyers think to check for this part, most get away scott free.

So how do you know if the car you want to purchase still has an airbag? How do you determine if the airbag will still function correctly?

First of all, you should inspect the steering wheel for signs of tampering. Thieves often leave dings and dents in the interior plastic when they remove the airbags. Another thing you can do is watch the air bag indicator light when you turn on the car. It should glow briefly, then turn off. If the light never comes on, or if it comes on and stays on, then the air bag probably isn’t functioning correctly.

You can also visit the site, www.safercar.gov, and type in the vehicle’s VIN or vehicle identification number to see if one of more of the airbags in the vehicle has been permanently deactivated. Click on “Air Bags”, then under “Air Bag Basics” on the left, click on “Air Bag – VIN number” to search the database. The data at this site may not be complete since the site relies on third parties to report whether an air bag has been removed or disabled. As a last resort, you can have a mechanic you trust inspect the car for air bags.

For the most part, air bags are an “out of site, out of mind” kind of issue. But since replacement could run from $600 to $800 it may be worth your while to consider this issue next time you shop for a used car.

At Clinard Insurance Group in Winston Salem, NC, we want all of our clients to be as safe a possible on the road. We can also help you get the best protection on your home insurance and your auto insurance at rates that will make your head spin. Check us out at www.ClinardInsurance.com or call us toll free at 877-687-7557.

The source material for this article was pulled from The Insurance Answer Guy

The Dealers Open Lot Deductible Trap

Clinard Insurance Group, in Winston Salem, NC, specializes in handling the insurance needs of used car dealers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and Tennessee. With so many clients in this industry, I thought I should speak out about a little known provision in the dealers open lot coverage that creates a nasty surprise for many dealers after a claim has occurred. I call it the comp deductible trap.

Any dealer that has a substantial investment in his or her inventory should carry dealers open lot insurance as part of his or her Garage Liability Policy. This will provide comprehensive and collision coverage for the inventory on the lot and out on the road and it is the least expensive if you add it to your garage policy. Just like your personal auto insurance, the comprehensive and collision coverage in the dealers open lot protection has deductibles. These deductibles are the first dollar amount that the dealer must pay before the insurance company pays out for the claim. But here is the catch….. the deductible on the comprehensive coverage is almost always a per car deductible. And that can add up.

Let’s say you have 20 cars on your lot and a hail storm hits your dealership. 10 of your cars are very badly damaged. You know that you have comprehensive coverage on your dealers open lot so you pull out your policy and see that you have a $1000 deductible. Okay, you think to yourself, this is bad but I guess I can cough up $1000 since I have 10 cars that are in awful shape. When your claims adjuster shows up to start working on this claim for you he reminds you that the deductible is $1000 per car with a 5 car limit. This is the way most open lot coverages are written. Suddenly your $1000 deductible has turned into $5000 and you are really singing the blues. Your cash flow is wrecked for months.

How can you protect yourself from this trickery? Well, first of all, be sure that you read and understand your policy completely. Also, only do business with an agent that specializes in the garage policy and used car dealers. Your business is very unique in the insurance world and you can’t afford to let and agent that has handled the insurance for 5 or 10 dealers in his career protect you. Let’s face it, your business is one of your most valuable assets and it can lead to your largest liability risks. Don’t let an inexperienced agent practice on learning the garage policy and its one of a kind ins and outs at your expense.

As I mentioned earlier, Clinard Insurance Group in Winston Salem, NC, handles the garage insurance needs for hundreds of used car dealers in 4 states. And the best part is we have found a company that does not have a per car deductible on comprehensive coverage in the dealers open lot insurance. So in the example above, if you were insured with Clinard Insurance Group, you would only pay $1000 for that devastating hail storm and not $5000. You can see how doing business with a specialist can be extremely valuable for you and your company. If you would like more information or help insuring your used car dealership, you can visit us online at www.theautodealershelper.com or call us, toll free at 877-687-7557.

The source material for this article was pulled from http://www.insuranceanswerguy.com/

Garagekeepers Insurance – Direct, Legal Liability, Primary and Excess - what are these choices now?

The Garage Liability policy is one of the most misunderstood types of business insurance policies. It is a unique type of policy and many seasoned professional insurance agents don’t really understand it well. Attached to the garage liability policy, one often finds a coverage called garagekeepers insurance. At Clinard Insurance Group in Winston Salem, NC we understand this form very well and in part 2 of my blogs on garagekeepers insurance I hope to continue to clear up some of the confusion about this policy form.

As we discussed in the my last blog, the garagekeepers form is a coverage that can be added to the garage form and it allows for protection for the your clients vehicles, left in your care while you are repairing them. This coverage includes both comprehensive and collision coverages for those vehicles.

When purchasing this coverage, there are 2 more choices you will need to consider. The first is the question of Direct coverage, verses Legal Liablity coverage. If you purchase direct coverage, then your policy will pay the claims for collision and comprehensive coverage for your client’s vehicles whether you are at fault in the loss or not. If you choose legal liability coverage, then these claims will only be covered if your repair or body shop can be found to be legally liable for the loss. Of course the direct coverage will be a bit more expensive but you may choose it so that you can quickly pay the damages caused to any of your client’s cars.

The second question that you will want to answer is whether or not you want to purchase Primary or Excess coverage on your garagekeepers coverage. Primary coverage means that your insurance policy will pay, first dollar on the covered loss, while excess coverage will only kick in an pay when there is no coverage on your client’s insurance policy, or if the limits of your client’s policy are not high enough to cover the loss. Of course the primary option is more expensive but it may generate better client relationships if you are paying the claim and not forcing them to file on their own personal auto insurance.

At Clinard Insurance Group in Winston Salem, NC, we write over 300 garage policies in 4 different states and we can help you make sure that your policy is set up correctly so that you can have the best possible protection at the lowest possible price. Give us a call, toll free at 877-687-7557, or visit us on the web by clicking here.

The source material for this article can be found at The Insurance Answer Guy.

Garagekeepers Insurance – How Does It Really Work?

The Garage Liability policy is one of the most misunderstood types of business insurance policies. It is a unique type of policy and many seasoned professional insurance agents don’t really understand it well. Attached to the garage liability policy, one often finds a coverage called garagekeepers insurance. At Clinard Insurance Group in Winston Salem, NC we understand this form very well and I hope to shed some light on this to eliminate some of the confusion that business owners often have about this protection.

The garage form is a liability based coverage that has been created especially for car dealers and automotive repair shops. Basically if you are in the business of buying, selling or repairing motor vehicles, you will need this coverage. The confusion relating to the garagekeepers coverage I think comes from the name. Just having the name garage in this form confuses people. Auto repair shop owners often wonder why they need garagekeepers coverage if they already have a garage policy. The garagekeepers form is an add-on coverage to the garage policy and it is designed to covers losses occurring to customers’ cars that are left in the possession of the repair shop. So if you are repairing cars and your building burns down in the night and you have 3 cars inside, you had better hope you have garagekeepers coverage on your policy or you will be buying your clients new cars on your own dime.

The garagekeepers form can include either comprehensive coverage, or collision coverage or both. When you purchase this coverage you should try and accurately predict the largest possible loss that could occur to customer cars left on your premises or repaired by your shop. You will also want to choose appropriate deductibles for the comprehensive and collision coverages.

In my next blog I will discuss the differences between direct primary and excess liability coverage for the garagekeepers form. As you can see, insuring a repair or body shop or a used car dealership requires an unusual coverage form that is not well understood by a lot of insurance agencies. If you own a repair shop, or a body shop, or if you own a used car dealership, you need to make sure that you are using an agent that specializes in these types of businesses. At Clinard Insurance Group in Winston Salem, NC, we write over 300 garage policies in 4 different states and we can help you make sure that your policy is set up correctly so that you can have the best possible protection at the lowest possible price. Give us a call, toll free at 877-687-7557, or visit us on the web by clicking here.
The source material for this article can be found at http://www.insuranceanswerguy.com/

What Happened to the Grace Period On My Insurance Policy?

Over the years at Clinard Insurance Group, helping people with their insurance needs, I have heard this question many times. It doesn’t matter if they are talking about auto insurance, home insurance, general liability insurance or workers compensation insurance, people still assume that there is some magical grace period that allows them to pay their insurance payment after the due date. I’m not sure exactly where the terminology comes from but I think I have an idea where the concept arose.

In NC, if you don’t pay your insurance policy when it is due, then the insurance company cannot just cancel your policy that day. The law requires that they give you a legal notice of cancellation. The time frame for this notice varies by policy type but it is generally around 15 days. So, if your policy is due on the 5th of the month and you don’t pay the bill on time, then somewhere around the 10th of the month or so, the insurance company will send out a notice of cancellation on your policy. This notifies you that if your money is not received by a certain date (here is the legal notice time frame), then your coverage under that policy will cease.

I think this notice period is what has led some people to believe that there is a “grace period” which allows them to pay their premiums after the due date. But paying late and relying on this legal notice time frame is a dangerous practice for several reasons.

First of all, the insurance company doesn’t have to accept your money after the due date and they can let the cancellation stand. If you have had a loss during this time, you might not even be protected since in some cases (particularly on policy renewal dates) the notice of cancellation states that the effective date for when protection ends is the same as the original payment due date.

Secondly, there is a growing trend among insurance companies to charge hefty fees for payments that are late. Some companies charge as much as $35 to reinstate your policy after a cancellation notice has been issued. These changes tell me that the insurance industry has decided that as times are hard and people are letting some bills slip a bit, they want to be first in line. So if you are having some cash flow issues and think you might want to pay your insurance bill a little late, be sure that you understand all of the late penalties and fees that will apply. You might choose to prioritize the insurance bill closer to the top of the pile.

There is a sure fire solution to prevent a late payment on your insurance policy and thus prevent lapses in protection and costly late fees. Most all insurance companies can now take your payment on a monthly bank draft. This means that they will draft the money from your checking or savings account on the due date automatically. Of course this will fail if there is not enough money in the account to pay the bill, but for protection from forgetting or misplacing an insurance bill, this one could save you a lot of money. At Clinard Insurance Group in Winston Salem, NC we try and make this option available to any an all of our clients who might be interested. If you would like to know more about the specific fees your company charges for late payments, or if you would like to have your policy set up on bank draft, please call our office at 877-687-7557 or visit us on the web at www.clinardinsurance.com.

The source information for this article was drawn from www.insuranceguy.com.

The NC Teen Driver Loophole - This simple trick could save you hundreds of dollars

In North Carolina, there is an old loophole in the car insurance rates for young drivers which has technically been closed but with the right help, you can still put this to work for you and cut your auto insurance costs by hundreds of dollars each year. At Clinard Insurance Group in Winston Salem, NC, we specialize in helping families with teen drivers and we know exactly how to make this loophole work for you.

In North Carolina, when you add your teen driver to your policy you will see your rates shoot up to levels that will shock you. But the good news is that these super high rates don’t last forever. During the 3 year “inexperienced driver” period the insurance company can surcharge your policy to account for the fact that teenage drivers have accidents more frequently and their accidents are typically more severe.

So how does it work? Well, there are three different tiers, one for each year of experience that a teen driver has. So, in your teenager’s first year of driving, he or she is in the highest rated tier and your policy is surcharged the maximum. But after one year of driving, your teenager is technically eligible to be re-rated to the 2nd tier, with lower surcharges. The third year of driving should find your teen driver in the least costly of these three experience period surcharges. The problem is that the timing of your child’s experience may not correlate well with your policy renewal dates so you might find yourself paying extra surcharges to the insurance company.

Let’s take an example. Assume your auto insurance policy renews on January 1st and runs for one year. Now let’s say you add your teen driver to the policy on February 1st, the day she gets her license. Immediately, the insurance company charges your policy with your daughter at the highest rated inexperienced operator tier. You grumble, pay the extra money and hope your child doesn’t have an accident or get any tickets which will make all of this much worse. The next year, on January 1st, your policy renews and since your daughter is still in her first year of driving your renewal price still has the highest surcharge for an inexperienced driver. Now on February 1st of this second year, your daughter gains her first full year of experience. So you would expect your rates to drop as she moves into the middle tier for inexperienced drivers. But here is the rub: the insurance company doesn’t have to move your daughter to the middle tier and refund some of the money back to you. The law says that they can wait until the next time your policy renews, which will be the next January. In this case you would be overpaying the insurance company by nearly an entire year for the inexperience driver surcharge.

If you knew the dollar amount of overcharge and it happened to you, you would be sick about it. On average, at Clinard Insurance Group, Inc we are able to save our teen driver families $387 per year by forcing the insurance companies to change the surcharge on the teen driver’s anniversary of his or her license. How do we do it? It is simple really. Because one of our specialties is insuring families with teen drivers we understand exactly which companies will allow the surcharge to be changed in the middle of a policy term. And because we handle so many teen driver families, the insurance companies that we use are willing to accommodate our clients. If a company won’t allow this and the timing is bad, we will advise our clients not to purchase insurance from that company.

So what can you do to avoid overpaying for your teen driver? First of all, use an independent agent who understands the ins and outs of insuring families with teen drivers. If you are having trouble finding an agent, give Clinard Insurance a call at 877-687-7557 or visit us on the web at www.clinardinsurance.com . Secondly, during the years that you have a teen driver on your policy, always try to purchase policies with the shortest time frame possible. Many companies will allow a 6 month policy and this can work to your advantage if your company refuses to adjust the inexperienced operator surcharges in the middle of the policy term.

If you would like more information about how to help your young driver become a safer driver, please visit our teen driver safety web site by clicking here.

The content for this article was pulled from www.insuranceanswerguy.com

The General Liability and Workers Compensation Insurance Policy Audit Trap – A Cash Flow Disaster

If you are business owner or the manager of a business, then you probably have some working knowledge about general liability insurance and workers compensation insurance. At Clinard Insurance Group in Winston Salem, NC, we specialize in insuring contractors and other small businesses who need these types of policies. And we have found time and again how many small businesses are seduced into the cash flow nightmare I call “the audit trap”.

For most contractors, their general liability and workers compensation insurance policies are rated based on payroll, and in some cases gross receipts as well. Since the exact amount of payroll or receipts is unknown to the insurance company when the policy is first written, the policy holder has to give the insurance company an estimate of the total payroll for the coming policy year. Many contractors and small businesses are tempted to “low ball” this estimate to reduce the total premium on their policy. While this strategy can work well if the company plans ahead for it, just shooting in the dark with low estimates can create a cash flow disaster.

Here’s why. Let’s say your actual payroll on for your company is $500,000 per year. And let’s also assume your general liability rate is $5 per $1000 of payroll. This means your policy costs would be $2500. Now let’s assume you start your policy with a low ball estimate of $250,000. This means your new policy is issued at a cost of $1250 instead of $2500. Looks pretty good so far. But now jump ahead 15 months and the insurance company has now performed an audit of your payroll and found that your actual payroll during that policy term was $500,000. So they send you a bill for the additional premium due of $1250. Now that wasn’t really unexpected, but if you didn’t budget for this, it could put a crimp in your cash flow. But here’s the kicker. The insurance company will now increase the payroll on your renewal policy and send you another bill for $1250 due right away. Suddenly you have to come up with $2500 to square yourself with the insurance company. And that can make for a real cash flow problem.

Again, if you plan for the audit and reserve funds to make the payment then you can gain a cash flow “float” advantage by low balling your payroll and gross receipts estimates. But more often than not, the business owner fails to implement a plan to reserve these funds and instead faces a cash flow crunch at audit time.

At Clinard Insurance Group in Winston Salem, NC, we specialize in insuring small contractors located all over the state of NC. If you would like help with your general liability or workers compensation policy, please give us a call, toll free at 877-687-7557 or visit us on the web at http://www.clinardinsurance.com/.

Source material for this article was taken from the site: http://www.insuranceanswerguy.com/.