When you have been with a company for 17 years you would think that company would appreciate it and do right by you but apparently that is not aways the case. As you can see from the post I made in 2009 when I first signed on with Amica for auto and home insurance, I was very happy with the company. How times have changed.
Yesterday I called Progressive and arranged to switch our auto and home insurance to them. I went online and got quotes from a number of the big insurance companies and Progressive gave me the best quote. On September 15th our coverage with Progressive will begin and we’ll say goodbye (and good riddance) to Amica.
What changed that made me want to leave Amica? It was all about the money. I wish I knew why they kept increasing our auto premium but it is a far cry from what we were paying back in 2009 and even with inflation, we should not be paying about $700 more. In no way is it reasonable to be paying $1600 a year for auto insurance even with the two cars we have covered. Those two cars around around 20 years old and since it does not make sense to pay a fortune for comprehensive coverage on older vehicles, we have the minimum coverage required by law.
To that you can add that both my wife and I are retired and we drive less than 5,000 miles a year — and that includes both vehicles! We are old and boring and we don’t go many places so why in the world would it cost $1600 a year for auto insurance? Is it because Amica is greedy? I would not doubt it but I do not know for sure. Perhaps they want to drive customers away for some reason. If so, it surely worked well on us!
So, to give you an idea how much they have raised our auto premiums over the years, consider our monthly premiums over just the past few years since we have had two cars on the policy. In 2022 when we added a second car to the policy we were paying around $80 per month. In 2023 that rose to $85, which was certainly not a shocking increase and we just carried on with Amica. In 2024 it dropped back to $80, which was a nice surprise. It went up significantly in 2025 to $100 and this year it rose again, this time to $117. Were not happy about that but we decided to just carry on.
The breaking point came quite recently when we received our new policy for the end of 2026 and into 2027. The monthly payment for our auto insurance was set to increase to $137 starting in October. It is not clear to me why it should increase so significantly but it was the push I needed to start checking quotes from other companies.
Our auto policy with Progressive that begins on September 15 will cost a total of $578 for a year, giving us a savings of about $1,000 compared to Amica. Our homeowners policy came in about $100 less than Amica so we are not saving quite as much on that. The Progressive representative I talked to when I set up our policies yesterday was a perfectly pleasant gentleman in Texas. We even had a few laughs during the process. It was just as easy and pleasant as my experience had been when I first called Amica back in 2009.
Why Progressive can offer us an auto policy for $1,000 less than Amica is a mystery to me. I know Progressive is an aggressive company that will probably have to raise the cost of premiums eventually but we will surely enjoy the savings in the meantime and hope they do not raise them as high as Amica did.
I really feel let down by Amica. You would think that they could do better for customers that have been with them for 17 years and only ever had a single claim and that was when my son was on our policy back around 2013 and was hit by a drunk driver.
So it’s goodbye to Amica and hello to Progressive for both our home and auto coverage. I never cared much for the silly commercials Progressive runs on TV with “Flo” and other silly characters but it surely is not enough to keep me from signing on with them for a savings of $1100 a year.
