• Understanding insurance
• Advice about buying insurance
• Shopping for insurance online

Understanding insurance

A fairly concise “Insurance Basics” course from the Women’s Financial Network gives a good overview of life, health, disability, auto and homeowner's insurance. It also suggests how to prioritize when you can’t afford as much insurance as you might like to have.

Advice about buying insurance

Because of the complexity of most types of life insurance, the Consumer Federation of America recommends only using the Internet to shop for term life insurance. It urges consumers to analyze other types carefully -- by reviewing written material from insurers, seeking advice from a fee-only financial planner, or by getting an insurance evaluation from CFA.

You’ll also find useful advice and tips about buying various types of insurance from:

SmartMoney’s “Best Buys” advice pages;

Money magazine’s “Money 101” section on insurance; and

The “Managing” section of Kiplinger.com on insurance.

Shopping for insurance online

Many Internet sites that provide insurance information and quotes are flawed. Often, they have a bias toward high-commission policies, or are merely designed to steer visitors to a particular insurance agency. The Consumer Federation of America has sorted through the most popular life-insurance sites and found the ones that best at tracking down low-cost term insurance.

The CFA’s top site, Term4Sale.com, contains an online version of the term-life comparison software that the company sells to insurance agents.

Runners-up in the CFA study include:

InsWeb. This site provides quotes from dozens of major insurance companies, including car insurance, home insurance, term life insurance, non-group health insurance. For some states, only limited information is available.

Quotesmith. A service similar to InsWeb, providing quotes on policies that that range from life and auto insurance to health, dental and travel insurance.

Other sites that passed a CFA test of their ability to identify the lowest-cost term life insurance for a hypothetical individual were NetQuote, Quicken, and  Youdecide.com.

In its August 2001 report, the CFA declared that 40 percent of the Internet sites it analyzed (10 out of 25 sites) were "so inadequate and potentially misleading that they are Not Recommended." Among these sites were Insure Rate, Intelli-quote, Insure One, Compusurance, SpeedInsure, 4freequotes, accuquote, answerfinancial, ebix, and SelectOne. But the study concluded that, by using several good sites, consumers can save hundreds of dollars on term life insurance. For a discussion of factors to consider when buying term life insurance, visit the CFA’s own site.