Man I screwed something up this time with my new-hire paperwork. Get this, roughly half (46%) of my paycheck is going to pay Federal and California income taxes and charities.

Argh. I thought I had this shit figured out. Time to seek professional tax help.

technorati: taxes, california, federal

Created 47 weeks, 2 days ago

Many of you know that I am a former employee of USAA. One of the benefits of working there is, that after vesting, I still retain a few perks as a former employee.

One of those perks is access to a level of automobile insurance with them. The rates are a bit higher for me than the core members (as I was not a full 5-year employee), but they are still very competitive.

However, when I left the company last year, California was not endorsing auto insurance policies for USAA's former employees plan. This meant that I had to find new insurance until USAA worked it out with California.

I was disappointed. So I did the only reasonable thing. I left my policy (and vehicle) registered in Texas while I sought out new insurance. 10 months later, after receiving a compelling offer via e-mail, I finally decided to give GEICO a chance.

GEICO was a real pleasure to deal with. From the web site to the customer service representatives, it was fresh and fun (well, fun for insurance); heck even the prices were good. That's it, I was satisfied, sign me up.

I called USAA to cancel my policy and let them know I had found alternative insurance. Well guess what?

It turns out USAA worked out their problem with California in January 2007 and they would be able to cover me in California now. I just needed to make the appropriate Texas-to-California coverage changes and suffer a slight increase in my premium.

Even with the increase, the new USAA premium was 100 dollars less than my 6-month GEICO policy quote. Argh. I had to make a decision. There was no use in keeping 2 insurance policies active.

I stuck with USAA. I guess it was because I have used them for so long now that I know what kind of service I can expect when I give them a call.

Not perfect service. No, that I am still waiting for (imagine... Google Insurance). USAA isn't as friendly as GEICO was either. In fact, my experience was that GEICO outperformed USAA at customer service hands down (friendlier, more cheerful, better hold music, better IT infrastructure [no MSR waiting for a PC to 'do its thing']).

I suppose when it comes to auto insurance, my Marketing persona is "sticks with what he knows". I wonder if I did the right thing... Anyone have any GEICO rocks stories?


technorati: GEICO, USAA, auto, insurance

Created 56 weeks, 5 days ago