We have been good liberty mutual customers since we needed renters insurance in grad school. We used them for renter’s insurance, then car insurance, then home owners insurance, then life insurance, then umbrella insurance. We never shopped around. They were reasonably good price-wise from people we talked to and the couple times we had to use them for car stuff they were very easy to work with. They were just a good company.
Then they started their stupid ad campaigns. And sold off our life insurance to another company. Our car insurance still seemed reasonable, but last year our home owners insurance almost doubled to almost 7K. We called and they said, oh, inflation, prices going up etc. A google search suggested that yes, there were big jumps, but not THAT big.
So I tried to get online quotes and was taken basically to a clearinghouse site that instead of giving us actual quotes just gave our information to insurance agents. Our inbox was inundated with spam from sketchy places and less sketchy places and we got actual letters in the mail and in the end the liberty mutual insurance just renewed and I paid it and got busy and gave up.
This year, one of my colleagues lives in my neighborhood and asked if we have an insurance provider we like because her insurance just went up to 3K. And I was like… liberty mutual is 7K and your house is nicer(!) She said they used to use liberty mutual but there was a crazy jump so they shopped around and were now using travelers. So I went to the travelers website to see if I could get a direct quote from them, but they just took me to the site with all the same clearinghouse site as before. This time DH filled it out. We got some more mailers which I collected.
Then we got this year’s Liberty Mutual quote– nearly 12K, again, almost but not quite double last year’s. That’s not ok.
I called Liberty Mutual and they repriced as new down to 11K. Which, um, not enough.
So I emailed all the people who had sent us mailers. And I found this US News site which took me to places to get online quotes that weren’t as sketchy. Well… Amica wasn’t sketchy. The other online quotes were the same “we can’t give you an online quote call our agent” garbage. But some of the emails we got back had links to fill out to get online quotes so we used those. Any time someone asked to call, we said no thank you email only.
All-State gave us lots of low quotes from different agents. State Farm directed us to one agent at one agency and I went back and forth with him via email to get a full quote which was pretty decent. After filling out the Amica online site we got a quote there and we decided that was probably what we wanted so DH called them to purchase it and was on the phone for like an hour. The number went up. But then they found they’d not followed state law on something where we needed to have a different amount of coverage and the number went down by $1000 back to a little lower than the original quote.
There are two major differences between our Liberty Mutual coverage and the Amica coverage:
1. Our Liberty Mutual had the replacement cost of the roof. Our roof is on year 19 of a 30 year so it is going to be on the “bad” list for insurance companies (who assume a 20 year roof) probably for the next 11 years, give or take. New insurance doesn’t do the replacement cost of the roof, just the actual value of the roof. I am ok with this. Insurance is for unexpected needs, not expected roof replacements. I don’t need to over-pre-pay a roof replacement in installments to the insurance company. Especially not for another decade.
2. DC1 was not on the Liberty Mutual car insurance. But since zie is home for the summer we needed to add hir, so we did. Even with that (spoiler!) the auto is still less expensive(!)
So:
Before (Liberty Mutual):
Home: 11K
Auto (without DC1): 3K
Umbrella: 500 (it actually went up to $564 for next year, but we didn’t get that estimate until after we’d switched)
Total: 14.5K
After (Amica):
Home: 2.4K
Auto (with DC1): 2.2K
Umbrella: 350
Total: <5K
So… there’s almost a 10K difference. That’s more than a month of take-home pay!!! That’s INSANE!
How often do you shop around for insurance? What’s your trigger? Would you have lost ~4K putting off shopping around for a year (though to be fair, I didn’t KNOW putting it off a year it was going to cost us 4K because I hadn’t done any shopping around).
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
June 10, 2024 at 4:54 am
I hate insurance, hate hate hate, except when I really need it, but we’ve been fortunate to live in an area where rates are pretty low.
Our home insurance rates started low (under $2000 a year) and have barely budged for 20 years, but that’s what happens in a rural area where housing values are depressed.
Car insurance is another matter. When we had two teen drivers and four cars (mostly junkheaps), and when one of those teen drivers had an accident and a ticket on the record, our car insurance hit its highest point: over $3000 a year. I always found that bill really painful to pay. Then the kids got their own insurance and we reduced the fleet to two cars, which took our car insurance bill down to around $800 a year. It stayed that way for over a decade, until last year, when it suddenly doubled. Why? Well, we went from beater cars to nearly-new models, which made a big difference, and we went from filing no claims for many years to filing three in two years, all for incidents that were entirely not our fault. I suppose I could shop around to see if we could get a better rate, but I keep reminding myself that it’s not $3000.
Next challenge: my husband is turning 65 soon, so we’re getting constant telephone solicitations, email, and snail mail to try to sell us on the idea that Medicare is too complicated for normal people to understand and so we need these insurance agents to guide us through the process and introduce us to new insurance products they think we need. I wish they would go away and leave us alone.
June 10, 2024 at 9:28 am
Yeah, getting new cars definitely increases costs, but hopefully they will go down as the cars age. Lucky on the home insurance rates staying low!
June 10, 2024 at 6:19 am
Wow! That’s huge! (And it’s inspiring me to put our insurance on my to-do list–where it’ll stay for at least a few more weeks.)
We have State Farm, and they’re reliable and reachable.
I know I’ll get judged for this, but I find the new Liberty Mutual ads funny (my family finds this horrifying :)! Their pricing wasn’t funny, however.
June 10, 2024 at 6:22 am
I agree with your family! And also, our rates were reasonable before they started that ubiquitous campaign.
June 10, 2024 at 8:30 am
These numbers are shocking/apalling, especially since I understand Amica to be a much better insurance company than Liberty. Our insurance with USAA has been creeping up a bit over time, but by relatively small amounts. Recompeting insurance plans is one of my financial to do items this year. I was planning to use Policy Genius to get quotes from multiple insurers without the spam. We used them for disability and life insurance years ago and the process was pretty seamless. As has the annual process of considering disability insurance increases as our salaries have grown.
June 10, 2024 at 8:49 am
Interesting! Let us know how Policy Genius goes!
We get disability through work. According to my colleagues who study it, that’s usually the best option if offered, so we’ve never shopped around for it. (I don’t know if it’s true that it’s the best option for disability in any individual case, but on average it is, apparently.)
June 10, 2024 at 9:19 am
We had a bad experience with Liberty Mutual when we bought our first house… husband spoke to a rep on the phone to get a quote, and the rep signed us up for the insurance without us agreeing to it. What a pain that was!
Thanks so much for sharing your experience! I’ll check with my husband about our insurance rates. We have State Farm and have been very happy with them, but one must always be on the look out for companies (and apparently local government, see: your recent experience with property taxes) trying to screw us over. Blegh.
June 10, 2024 at 9:26 am
State Farm gets good ratings.
June 10, 2024 at 9:49 am
We just switched insurance companies. We had State Farm for many years and had good service, but the rates kept going up. Several years ago we signed up with an insurance broker who found us a much better deal with Hanover. But then last year Hanover wanted to almost double our rates. We now have 3 cars and a teen driver, and had an insurance claim on one of the cars (I was hit by a student on an electric scooter). Our broker shopped around and we ended up going with AAA (I got a quote from State Farm, too, since our broker doesn’t deal with them, but it was considerably higher and they wanted to monitor our driving, which…heck no). Some of the best-reviewed insurance companies are not available in our state, unfortunately. We haven’t had AAA long so I can’t say yet whether we’re happy with them as a company, but we’re at least paying a lot less than we would have if we’d stayed with Hanover.
We live in an area with very few natural hazards. But the way states and municipalities have allowed/incentivized homebuilding in hazard-prone areas means that the entire insurance industry is a house of cards. Restrictive zoning in (relatively) safer cities on the west coast, for example, has expanded the urban-wildlands interface further and further as people seek affordable land, increasing residential exposure to wildfires and landslides. At the same time, overbuilding in low-lying coastal communities in the southeast has exposed more people to flood risk, while filling in wetlands that function as shock absorbers. So there’s a combination here of too many restrictions in safer areas with good infrastructure and not enough restrictions on land that shouldn’t be built on. All this means that everyone’s insurance rates are going up, even in areas that aren’t experiencing a high level of claims. And eventually, as extreme weather events get more common and more extreme, the market will likely implode altogether because there will just be too many claims. This is why states are now offering their own insurance of last resort–so filling in with tax dollars to prop up development in hazardous places where the market has said no thank you. And also why increasing numbers of people in those areas are choosing to self-insure, but that’s not a great option and also not available to people with mortgages.
June 10, 2024 at 10:02 am
That all makes a lot of sense.
June 10, 2024 at 2:45 pm
I started with Liberty Mutual even though they required me to replace the roof first. They really care about roofs! The seller recommended another insurer that wouldn’t require that but would cost more. I opted against an insurer who didn’t care about roofs.
I used to shop around every few years. I’d go to my state’s department of insurance page to look up the top-rated companies in the state and used their price comparison tool for the top few companies and then called the best couple/three companies for estimates and the answer was to always stay with Liberty Mutual, so after a while I got lazy and quit doing that.
Then this year my insurance also doubled, but I had missed the renewal notice, so didn’t have enough money in my account, so their attempt to renew failed and I was late, so I just paid. Ugh. I plan to call them like you did and then switch to something else next year.
I use GEICO for car insurance, which also came out the best whenever I researched, so I quit researching. You get a discount for having both insurances with the same company, but Liberty Mutual wasn’t well rated for car insurance and vice versa.
I did once try for USAA (which I’d heard was both the best and cheapest) when I learned I could qualify through my dad, but their numbers kept going up with each step and there was just too much bureaucracy, so I gave it up.
June 10, 2024 at 3:59 pm
I dunno, might be worth switching to amica or State Farm now if your insurance doubled. Amica has an online thing you can use to get a quote.
June 11, 2024 at 1:58 am
That’s an impressive amount of savings. I have to do mine too as my policies got sold this year to a rando company with terrible reviews.
I don’t know how the average family is able to absorb this kind of inflation. Most people don’t have thousands of extra cash just lying around for insurance premium increases.
June 11, 2024 at 3:44 am
It’s a lot of work shopping around too.
June 12, 2024 at 3:53 am
I wonder if insurers intentionally don’t want the business, but there would be implications with the state insurance commission if they refused to renew. Forcing people out with significant increases may allow them to move people off their books without triggering other issues with the state.
June 12, 2024 at 4:14 am
I work for the federal government which doesn’t offer third-party disability insurance like they offer third-party health insurance. The Feds essentially self-insure, and rely in part on SSDI. In the long term, they would only replace 27% of my current income, which is not nearly enough. We will always need to have “extra money” to be able to invest for our daughter’s future. She’s disabled and we’ll always have to support her financially. My private disability insurance would pay out more monthly than my Fed insurance would.
Disability insurance was really hard to shop for – easily the most difficult financial product I’ve ever purchased. There are just so many variables to consider and thinking through whether a particular feature was needed and worth the cost broke my brain and my spirit. Knowing what I went through, I’d join a workplace disability plan any day instead. However, I also learned so much during the process and there’s so much you can tailor in your policy to meet your own specific needs. Knowing what I know now, I’m pretty confident that an employer’s disability insurance would be lacking for me and my specific circumstance.
June 12, 2024 at 8:14 pm
Over the years I have been in a few fender benders (fortunately no severe crashes; in each of my incidents both cars left under their own power after the paperwork was done). The best adjusters I dealt with were State Farm and Liberty Mutual; getting hit by Geico and Allstate customers was frustrating.
June 12, 2024 at 8:58 pm
Liberty mutual was great when we had a car claim, but that was also before their ad campaign and increased rates.