Jul 20, 2016
RV insurance savings gleamed from another blog
I thought I understood our RV insurance policies however I learned something new recently. As we live in B.C. Canada we are forced to deal with the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) which is a provincial crown corporation in British Columbia created in 1973 by the NDP government. I used to live in Alberta where there were competitive insurance agencies. Here it is a monopoly and ICBC is the only insurer. A few years ago there was a change and one was able to get a portion of their RV insurance, excess liability insurance, through a private company. Combined with using ICBC for the collision & comprehensive portion this did decrease the overall cost of insuring our RV. Once this was offered to us by the company that insured our home we made the switch.
This past May I read a post about insurance on Rae’s blog. Click here for the information on that post but pay close attention to the comment section. Croft who is also a friend of ours made some excellent points. The first is that if one travels to Mexico and is gone for 30 days or more, you can apply for a refund through both ICBC and your 3rd party insurer, which in both Croft’s case and ours is Aviva. It is my understanding that Ontario also has this refund policy if you travel to Mexico. The reason for this refund policy is that you must purchase additional vehicle insurance if you travel into Mexico as your provincial insurance will only cover you for travel within Canada and the USA. It only stands to reason that your insurer should return this to you. I have no idea what the other Canadian provinces do. Anyone know? I believe that those who live in the USA and travel to Mexico must also purchase separate insurance but again I have no idea if they are able to be reimbursed. Up until this year we also received a refund much larger than what we paid for the Mexican insurance. Sadly as our vehicles are older now both ICBC and Aviva are paying us less in reimbursement.. We still do break even though. In previous years the excess reimbursement actually covered the tolls on the roads within Mexico.
What caught my attention is that Croft commented that he let his ICBC insurance lapse when he had his RV parked at home. We have always purchased insurance for a full 12 months ( from both ICBC & Aviva ) and it never ever occurred to me to cancel the ICBC portion for the six months that we have our RV in storage. In 2014 our RV insurance cost us a total of $1470.00. As Colin turned 65 last year our insurance decreased to $1368.00. We only drive our RV for half the year as we work during the summer and it is parked for at least 6 months of the year. Aviva does cover the storage portion at no additional cost to us.
So I contacted ICBC and once we brought in our license plates, we were given a $314.00 refund for the remaining months that we had been insured for. Our RV is still insured for the same value it was whether we had kept the ICBC portion or not.
Thanks to Rae’s post and Crofts’s comments we saved $314.00 this year. However my mind is screaming at how much money I could have saved over the past years had I only known that I could have cancelled my ICBC insurance for 6 months of the year 😯 That would have amounted to an immense pile of pesos.
Oh well, live and learn.
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Thanks for the tip will need to check into that for us, though e don’t store out coach maybe we can save a few bucks.
We also take full insurance off our second car when we are down South. It just sits in our garage anyway for three months. We only have storage coverage on it. Also when we get to our park in FL, we put storage insurance only on the motorhome again because we don’t move it out of the park for three months. It takes a few phone calls and a note to not forget to put the insurance back on when we drive these vehicles again. But we save several hundred bucks.
We also take off the road coverage on our second vehicle when it’s parked in the garage over the winter, we leave the other (non-road) coverage on, it’s saved us lots of $$. It creates lots of paperwork for the insurer (full coverage document then a paper refund document followed by full coverage document again in April when we return) but the broker “stick handles” it for us. I figure we save $500-$600 each year, and like you I’m kicking myself that I hadn’t done it earlier!
Just to add that we have always put storage insurance on our cars when we are traveling for the winter but for some reason never thought to do that with the RV. Maybe in the back of our minds we were always hoping to be able to head out in the RV for a few days here and there.
Here in Saskatchewan we only have to pay the insurance for the time that we actually drive it in Canada or the USA . Once we enter Mexico we cancel our insurance and when we are ready to cross back in the USA we have SGI (Saskatchewan Government Insurance) start it up again. We of course have insurance when driving through Mexico through another party. When the motorhome is sitting for the time we are at the park here in Saskatchewan, we again cancel it. For us we have this to be way better than what we had to deal with in Ontario. Trying to get them to cancel our insurance for our time in Mexico was like pulling teeth.
Ruth