Raising your car deductible cuts the premium. Read this first.

Dave Ramsey told his radio audience that raising your car insurance deductible is a way to bring the premium down, and Yahoo Finance ran the numbers to see whether the advice holds up in practice.

The math moves in one direction easily and the other direction all at once. Say you go from a $500 deductible to $1,000. Your premium drops every month, quietly, and you barely notice it. Then you get rear-ended and owe an extra $500 on the spot. The move pays off only if two things are true: you keep that difference sitting in savings, and you go several years between claims. If a $1,000 deductible is money you do not have on hand, you have not saved anything. You have converted a covered repair into one you cannot afford to start.

An independent agent can quote the same coverage at two or three deductible levels side by side so you can see the actual dollar difference before you commit, and re-shop the whole policy while they are in there.