I keep hearing that it’s better to switch but every time I check, nobody can beat Geico (for me). Not even USAA. Might be different if I weren’t driving an '02 Honda.
This hasn’t been my experience with Progressive or State Farm.
I have Progressive for all my motorcycles (they are by far the least expensive for motos from my research). Been with them for 10 years and it’s gone down overall (it’s hard to be exact as I add and remove motos).
I have State Farm for my car and my house. House has been 15 years - stayed the same. Car is 6 years old now and it’s gone down slightly over that time (it’s getting old enough I need to drop some of the coverage).
Geico on the other hand is complete BS. They start raising the rates before the ink is dry on the coverage contract.
This is definitely a thing with Comcast. my cable/internet provider. They sneak in increases and I have to call and threaten to switch.
But, I’ve had GEICO car insurance for more than 10 years, lots of different vehicles. No problem I shop around every once in a while, but they are also best.
I realized I haven’t changed my USAA policy in almost 15 years or so, so I logged in to see – AFAICT, my rates are still pretty damn low, under $50 per month, for both auto (full coverage, '04 Audi) and personal property.
Erie and Progressive have both gone down for me, I’m a long-time customer of both.
If you (OP) have been a reliable customer for 9 years, you have considerable leverage. Use it. Get a quote from someone else, and ask your carrier to match it. They just might.
I’ve used the same agent for 40 years. If ever I question some charge, I call him up and ask him to run the figures in different ways. Sometimes he comes up with some creative account modifications, and sometimes he uncovers billing errors from the home office. (And sometimes he calls me first!) So it never hurts to check.
It also doesn’t hurt to point out, if appropriate, that since you (as an example) have paid $30,000 in insurance premiums over time, and have made claims totaling only $2,000, maybe it’s time for a, uh…“rate adjustment,” i.e., discount.
That’s my situation as well. I’ve been with State Farm basically forever, accident-free, and gradually built up to their maximum 6-star or whatever it’s now called accident-free discount and non-cancellation guarantee (for whatever that’s worth). I haven’t tried getting competitive quotes in many years, but the one time I did I was told they couldn’t match the rates, and back then I didn’t even have the long spotless record I have now. I find it hard to believe that I could get better rates from some company that didn’t know me from a hole in the ground and didn’t have access to my very long claims-free record. I don’t doubt that switching can save some folks money as several posters have related, but I think it depends on who you’re with, how long you’ve been with them, and what your claims record with them is.
The other thing about insurance is that it’s not much use if the company is going to screw you around when you really need them. I’ve had a few auto comprehensive claims with State Farm over the years and recently quite a large claim on the homeowner policy (storm damage to the roof) and they’ve been quite good about paying claims.
I suppose I could shop around but being both lazy and risk-averse, I probably won’t. 
USAA is fantastic, for several years, I actually comparison shopped and found them to be not necessarily the lowest, but always competitive…not to mention very easy to deal with, they don’t play the insurance company games, my rates have gone down over the years and you get a little check at the end of the year…not EVERY year (Katrina), but many more than not…
I’m just flabergasted this doesn’t exits in the US. Here in Holland, this is exactly what you do. There are a handful of these comparison sites (they pretty much give you the same results). You enter the license plate, your adress and your age. Then you get the quotes in three types (liability only, full coverage and something called liability+) which include pretty much the same for all insurers.
Another item you can include is your amount of “damage free years”, in other words: the time you have gone without a claim. Pretty much every year the price of your insurance drops if you didn’t use it, and the best part, this is recorded in a nation wide database, so you can transfer these years to other insurers. I just changed insurers, because I bought a new car and wanted different coverage, I think I only had to sign up for the new insurance and they handled everything, including closing my contract with the old insurer.
It works exactly the same over here with changing energy companies, phone plans (including keeping your phone number), health care. Really, changing any of these takes little more than 15 minutes.
Well here in America we are the land of technological innovation and free market capitalism, which means literally all the things that you named are awful in terms of price and what they deliver as well as being much more difficult to switch, and that every other first world nation does a better job than us. 
I’ve had GEICO for 20 years and no one has come close to beating them. I’ve let AAA and all kinds of local State Farm people and whoever else try to get my business and sometimes their low rates are 3x what I’m paying.
I’m shocked everybody isn’t with AAA. I’ve been a member and insurance customer for decades now, and the only thing that raises my rates is buying a new car.
I have USAA, and yeah, for full coverage with the +20% on a total loss claim (you have to get that with USAA because the method they use tends to undervalue the replacement value of your car) it’s $80 a month, for a 2012 Prius.
Congrats on your new 2014, that’s the last year of the Gen 3 Prii, and the Gen 4 Prii have an uglier styling, although Gen 4 has drivetrain improvements.
Can I ask what price and mileage you have managed to negotiate to? I was able to get my 2012 with 86k miles for $9500. The 2013s I looked at tended to be 1500 more and the 2014s another 3k, there seemed to be a rather large increase for a couple years newer vehicle, well in excess of the expected difference in maintenance cost.
I read some of the posts, but not all.
At any rate, this subject has been bothering me for years now – it didn’t used to exist.
Two weeks ago I switched back to a local (independent) Agent “A” for my homeowner’s, and I asked the woman why do companies keep jacking rates up after a year or two? I’m old and am getting tired of chasing all this paperwork around on a regular basis. I’ve got better things to do in my spare time. She said as agents they are very frustrated with it also.
I’d had my current company (Liberty Mutual) one for one year, I dealt with them online only. I went with them for the cheapest price. After one year they jacked me up 38% – and mind you, I’ve had houses since 1975 and have NEVER made even one insurance claim.
Autos: I’ve had a different local indy agent (Agent B) for maybe three years now, am covered by Traveler’s. On a bright sunny afternoon this April, I was doing about 50 in my '17 Toyota pickup and a deer ran out, hit it with my RF corner, gutted the deer, smashing the whole front end, but no airbags went off.
I had it towed to my buddy’s shop, and the initial estimate (pending more damage) was in the low $10Ks. My buddy said the Traveler’s adjuster was absolutely great to work with; many are a real PITA. My buddy took it apart, found more damage, adjuster came back, and upped the number to $11,400.
Traveler’s, and my local agent, were absolutely wonderful to deal with. NYS? – not so much, but the agent went out of her way to help me with the state paperwork. The entire incident dealing with the insurance could not have gone smoother or better. I had a minor claim back in the mid- late-'80s; otherwise nothing, no tickets either. Traveler’s has not raised my rates, as of yet anyway.
Before going back to Agent A for my homeowner’s a few weeks ago, after Liberty Mutual jacked me up 38%, I had asked Agent B (where my vehicles are) for a homeowner’s quote. He never got back to me, and this was the owner’s son. I guess they don’t need my money.
Go figure. I hate all of it, and am hoping this endless merry-go-round will end before I croak.
The newspaper model these days is to continually raise subscription and newsstand rates while making the product worse (shrinking editions, fewer features etc.).
The idea evidently is to cash in while they can on older readers who can’t see life without their paper(s) and who are willing to pay the exorbitant price for an inferior product.
Sadly, we are now for the first time in many years not getting the local paper on a daily basis. It’s just not worth $600 a year for everyday delivery.
I’ve been with Liberty Mutual for literally decades. That saved us when we moved, back in 02, and no other company would touch us for homeowners’ insurance because we’d had 2 claims in 3 years at the old place (even LM waffled a bit, and they’d renewed the policy more than once since those claims).
Then I noticed that our homeowner’s premiums (on the new place) had more than doubled over the course of 6 years. I was ready to jump ship because we were a) adding my son as a driver (ouch!) and b) wanted to get an umbrella policy. Amazingly, our homeowners’ insurance was able to be re-rated… and dropped back down to what it had been before. The car insurance of course soared but we expected that.
This is a good reminder to me to shop now, though. The cars are a LOT older (one will be 12 in a couple months… the other one is 19 years old and we dropped collision on it a few years back). and I just checked and our rates have gone up again this year. The kid did have one accident about 3 years back but has a clean record since then, and he’s now been driving solo for 5+ years.
They sneak these rate increases in when you have automatic billing set up - too easy to ignore the actual amount.