Frugal Fridays: The Progressive Snapshot Program

Everyone wants to save a little money here and there, right? Especially on things we legally HAVE to pay for, like car insurance. Purchasing car insurance can be a giant pain in the ass: you have to search for hours and compare prices and hope the coverage is close enough so that the comparison is actually apples to apples. This blog is not about that.

I’ve been with Progressive for more than 5 years, and I’m pretty satisfied with their service, but this isn’t about that either. This is about their Snapshot program. (No they are not paying me a cent to write this.)

So what IS Snapshot? Well, it’s a device that looks like a weird, awkward USB drive. You plug it into your car and it sends data about when you drive, how long you drive, and if you make any hard breaks. You plug it into your car’s data port and drive normally. If you break too hard, it beeps at you to let you know, like that annoying back seat driver you know.

It comes in this cute little box with some paperwork. So I plugged it in, which was pretty easy. My port is on the underside of my steering wheel and easily accessible. I drove my normal route for a month. At any time I could log into my account and see my most recent trips. The report clearly showed when I was traveling and for how long, and how many hard stops I had.

My one complaint is that the Snapshot’s “hard stops” are focused solely on deceleration speed, and don’t seem to take into account how fast you were actually moving at the time. So if you’re driving a mere 2 miles an hour (basically just coasting before even setting foot on the gas) and you have to stomp on the brakes it counts against you as a hard brake. Kinda silly.

Anyhow, apparently I’m a fairly decent driver, because after the first month I received a 7% discount on my policy! I’m supposed to continue to use the Snapshot throughout the policy term to get the maximum discount available. Now as you can see, I don’t drive very far for the most part. My commute is less than 7 miles each way, and I almost always drive during the day, and very rarely late at night. This works to my advantage here. The good news is, even if you’re not a great driver, your rate won’t go up, so the worst that can happen is…nothing. 🙂

I’m pretty happy with the program so far, and I’ll update as the policy period continues.

Have a great weekend, everyone!