May 16, 2011
The price of American auto insurance policies bumped up one fifth of one percent between March and April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In its latest Consumer Price Index (CPI) report, the BLS stated that the price of an average motor vehicle coverage policy in April 2011 was 3.8 percent higher than in April 2010.
The rise in car insurance prices was small in April and recent months when compared to the rise in prices for all goods that are tracked as part of the CPI. While car coverage costs rose by only 0.2 percent last month, costs for all items increased by 0.6 percent.
Source: http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpid1104.pdf
The same trend was documented in previous CPI reports. Premiums inched up only 0.1 percent between February and March, but the cost of all items shot up 1 percent during that same period.
Increases in the average premium price have been relatively minimal in 2011. All upward month-to-month changes so far this year have been 0.3 percent or below. That’s a pretty heavy contrast to the rises seen in the October and November 2010 reports, when the month-to-month increases were 1.1 percent and 0.9 percent, respectively.
Even though the car insurance prices documented in the CPI have been slowly increasing, actual expenditures may have remained the same or even decreased. That’s because consumers can take a number of steps to chip away at their individual costs. The policies used as the basis for the CPI, on the other hand, see fewer adjustments.
To read more about this and other insurance issues, readers can go to http://autoinsurance.com/ to have access to a number of resource pages and a free-to-use quote-comparison tool that will generate sample rates from a number of companies for one driver profile.
