Insurance is an expense we'd all like to minimize – without loss of quality. There are several services that encourage insurers to make their best offers, but it can be difficult to distinguish whether the website or 800 number is truly representing multiple insurers, or is just pushing a single company's products. We also find that, having requested quotes, there are likely to be follow-up e-mails and phone calls for a year or more afterwards that need to be dealt with. Once a company has your contact information, they tend to be very persistent and even aggressive in trying to sell you insurance.

But there is a better way. What if you could solicit bids for the insurance package you need without revealing your contact information? Say you could spell out what level of house insurance, car insurance, life insurance and/or medical insurance you need, and have insurers bid on the package in competition with each other – without contacting you directly or through e-mail – wouldn't that be a great way to select your provider or providers?

You can do this. Reverse auction sites allow you to specify what you want, and the site invites suppliers to bid on your needs. You decide what service, product or combination you want and how long the bidding should be open. So you could post your needs six weeks before your insurance contract expires, let it run for a month, and have a couple of weeks to select the winner and create the contract.

Reverse auction websites do not allow you to publish your contact information. This protects you from aggressive solicitation, and avoids bypassing the site – which normally charges a small amount for the service they provide. Some will allow the provider to publish contact information, trusting that you will complete the contract through the site, since the site typically allows listings to be free and charges a small success fee to the winning bidder. Most people find one of the greatest benefits of the reverse auction process to be the privacy it generates for them, and the sense of control they have over the transaction. This is only possible if you do your negotiating through the site without revealing your contact information – it leaves you in charge of how to evaluate the bids, and avoids coming under pressure from each supplier who gets your contact information before the contract is completed.

The art in posting a requirement is to understand what the supplier needs to know, and to describe what you want clearly enough that the suppliers can bid responsibly. For house insurance, you might want to specify:

- Replacement value of the property;

- Type of construction;

- Age of house;

- Whether you have fire extinguishers;

- Value of furnishings – often estimated as about 75% percent of the value of the property;

- Zip code you live in;

- Any special valuables you want to include.

- What liability limits you would like;

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