You call your insurer to ask about your home’s coverage, and a few months later the policy is cancelled. Your automobile insurance premium is raised because your credit report shows you were late paying your credit card bill.

 

DOES THIS SOUND PLAUSIBLE?

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Think again. Innocent inquiries to your insurance agent or information that seems to have no bearing on your driving ability can make premiums skyrocket. Worse, your insurance might even be cancelled. Inquiries, even those that do not result in a claim, can appear in a little-known database called CLUE, or its smaller competitor A-PLUS. And your insurance “score” which is largely based on your credit rating, can determine how much you pay for homeowner’s or automobile insurance.

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If you’ve seen your CLUE report (Comprehensive Loss Underwriting Exchange) and you know your insurance score, chances are you’ve already been turned down for automobile or homeowner’s insurance. But probably, you, like most others, are clueless about CLUE. The CLUE report and the insurance scoring system are tools insurers use to decide your risk profile, or how likely you are to file a claim against your policy. Insurers feed information about paid claims – even your inquiries about coverage that don’t result in a claim – into a national database for use by insurers. Information included in the database, along with your insurance score, makes up your risk profile. Insurers use the profile to decide whether you get new insurance – even to decide if you get to keep the insurance you already have. If information is inaccurate, you can be left without insurance while you work out the errors.