Have you met FLO?

She's a fictional character that appears in commercials for Progressive Insurance. And she's awesome because she saved us MONEY! Ever heard of Snapshot? It's the coolest thing ever for car insurance. It's a device that looks like this:

You plug it into the diagnostic port of your car for one policy term, which is 6 months, and it shares a “snapshot” of your driving habits. You can earn up to a 30% discount per vehicle depending on how you drive. This is completely voluntary and you can cancel the Snapshot program anytime you'd like. Believe me, we thought about doing that several times. It was A LOT harder than we thought it would be because you don't think about how many miles you drive or what time of day you drive each and every day!! The savings is what kept us motivated ANAL :) 

If you avoid hard braking or stop–and–go driving, drive fewer than 30 miles per day, or avoid driving between 12am - 4am, then you're a great candidate for Snapshot! The hard brake rule is braking faster than 7 miles per second and that's very easy to do on the surface streets of AZ people! IT'S HARD! At first we thought if we stepped on the brake once then it counted as 1 hard brake and we quickly learned that was not the case. We could be going 45-50 mph and come upon a red light, which we would stop at, and get 3-5 hard brakes with just one step on the brake. So we started gaging lights and would watch for that flashing orange hand so we could time whether or not we'd make the light, and it worked!!

Family members and friends would tease us about how strict we were with our Snapshot, but we didn't care because in the end WE would be saving money. We have to admit we did use family members cars a few times when we knew Mike had to work past midnight and we were grateful for that. It kept our %'s in tact!

After the first 30 days, we got an initial discount which applied to our payments immediately. The Mazda came in at 7% and the Cobalt came in at 14%. We were way bummed. With 30% being the maximum discount we were nowhere near that but had another 5 months to bump those %'s up. And after 4 long and tortuous months WE DID IT!!!!!!

We are saving $212 on auto insurance every 6 months; that's $424 a year! See why we love FLO? :) The best thing about it is if we replace one of our current vehicles with a new car the discount transfers to the new car! Not bad when we were paying $150/mo and now we're paying $83/mo. Progressive ROCKS!