What Is A Clue Report?
If you're shopping around for low car insurance rate quotes, you may see CLUE reports mentioned. They aren't used by every insurance company out there, but many companies employ them as a way to determine car insurance premiums. It's certainly worth your time to know about the information that CLUE reports contain, and how your claim history can affect the insurance premiums available to you.
Insurance companies use CLUE (Comprehensive Loss of Underwriting Exchange) reports to access a prospective client's history of claims for cars or any other types of personal property, including homes and other big purchases. CLUE reports contain information about recent claims as well as the amount of those claims, and general information like your name, address, and phone number. Chances are very good that there's a report out on your claims history if you've ever made a claim, but as noted, not all insurance companies use the service. If your company does not use the service, then any claims you've reported will not end up in the registry.
As you may have guessed, CLUE reports figure heavily into the cost of your insurance premiums, as the information provided by the service is figured by insurance companies to consider the risk of insuring a driver or property owner. The more claims on a report, the worse rates you're going to get. However, there is good news: Comprehensive Loss of Underwriting Exchange reports only show information for the last five years, so older claims will not show up or affect your insurance premiums. If you want to see what information is out there, you can access your own report, but by federal law you can't access anyone else's claim history. So, if you're looking into buying property, don't count on being able to pull up the history of said property. Insurance agents are allowed to pull up CLUE reports when they're considering underwriting an insurance claim (so, they can open up your report, but only if you've made a request for credit from their company).
There's nothing you can do to eliminate claim information from your CLUE report, other than wait for the passage of time to wipe your record clean. However, if you've made a lot of claims you may want to get a copy of the report to see the same information that the insurance company sees. You may also want to do some searches online to get a variety of quotes, as different companies will interpret your claim history differently. You may be able to save quite a bit of money in the long run with a different policy.
