The media is full of experts telling us that spending too much time on the Internet is bad for our health. Time spent in front of the warm glow of our computer screens is rotting our eyes. Days spent hunched over a keyboard is killing our posture. I'm sure there are some out there who would even say our relative IQs are dropping because we have to expend very little effort to find the information we're looking for! (But let's face it-does anybody really miss spending hours hunched over a card catalog hoping to stumble across the one obscure piece of trivia we were looking for?)

What even the experts can't deny, however, is that today's web surfers are saving hundreds of dollars on their car insurance.

What is it that sets these elite individuals apart? They're taking advantage of the fact that most car insurance companies have joined the information age to kick the old ways of shopping for car insurance to the curb! Even a decade ago you would have had to spend hours on the telephone calling insurance providers from coast to coast or working with their agents personally to collect a very small sampling of car insurance quotes. The process could take days!

Since most drivers don't have the time or the patience to devote the better part of their week to gathering quotes from the 50+ car insurance companies currently doing business in the U.S. they would spend as much time as they could on their search, then choose the best rates from the five to ten companies they spoke to and sit back thinking they'd gotten the best possible deal on their insurance coverage.

Of course, most drivers are creatures of habit-and no one really want to invest that much time and effort more than once if they don't have to. In a move that most marketing experts would call brand loyalty and most drivers would call common sense, Americans were finding companies with respectable service and decent car insurance rates and sticking with them. They'd renew their policy year after year, and as long as nothing happened to rock the boat they could quite happily do business with that company for the rest of their lives.

Guess what ladies and gentlemen? The car insurance industry has been taking advantage of that, a fact that's never been more true than it is today. You see, over 40% of car insurance shoppers believe they're currently paying too much for their insurance coverage-and 50% of them are right. Car insurance rates have been falling rapidly in recent months, selling for hundreds less than they were last fall. New customers are coming in to these major providers and paying hundreds less than their loyal policyholders are paying for their renewals.

In other words, by loving the one you're with you're actually paying more than you would by being fickle and hopping from company to company. Go figure.

These car insurance companies are busted. Why? Because today's web surfers have begun using online quote finders to scan their options from dozens of different insurers, and they're finding out that by shopping around before renewing their policy they can take advantage of major savings that wouldn't be available to them otherwise. And by using these online quote finders they can spend minutes gathering the information that used to take insurance shoppers days to pull together.

What do you know? Spending hours a day surfing the web might just be paying off after all.