How Can I Get Low Car Insurance?
Have you ever had the question ‘how can I get low car insurance?’
It’s a great question, isn’t it? Every auto owner, let along every drag racing enthusiast, asks it each year. ‘How can I get low car insurance?’ Of course, there are all sorts of snappy comebacks and jocular responses that one could come up with. How can I get low car insurance?
- By not owning a car
- By never leaving your bed
- By suing your insurer for emotional distress over the cost of your current premiums,
Or, if you ask a nuclear physicist, they’ll say...
- It depends what you mean by ‘low’. And ‘insurance’. And ‘car’.
Low Car Insurance - The real answer
However, the real answer to this question is multi-faceted. Let’s start with the most important thing, shall we?
Be clean
The primo way to tamp down your car insurance outlay is to be a safe and careful driver. It’s simple, and the statistical correlates speak for themselves. The more accidents you have, the higher risk you’ll be deemed. The higher risk you are (and bear in mind that these figures are now calculated with complex algorithms), the higher your premium. It’s a sobering thought that in 2016, 4.6m Americans were injured in road traffic accidents. That is a lot. It’s more than one in every hundred citizens, but it’s more than that if you take the figure as a proportion of drivers themselves.
Basically, the cleaner you can stay, and for longer, the less your car insurance will be. If you’ve never made a claim, or had a claim made against you, you should benefit big-time from your safety-conscious mode of driving an automobile.
And ‘clean’
This is important too. Keep a clean license. Don’t get into trouble. Don’t get clocked exceeding the speed limit. If you’ve citations, tickets, or fines for any auto-related misdemeanors, that will ramp up your premiums, too, and by a lot. So, the longer you can stay out of auto-related trouble, the less you’ll pay for car insurance.
Deductibles
If you’re a young, professional, cocky, miserly misanthrope, you’d be ill-advised to deploy the old ‘deductibles’ trade in lowering your car insurance. If you drive like a maniac and think you’re an invincible Master of the Universe who never makes a mistake, lower your deductibles. Don’t raise them.
On the other hand, if you’re a sensible, safe, confident driver with an almost preternatural awareness of your vehicular surroundings, and you never get involved in even the tiniest scrape, then by all means go for higher deductibles.
Deductibles include the base amount of money you’ll have to contribute towards the costs of any insurance claim. Let’s say for example that you drive a top-of-the-range Maserati straight into a tree. You’re okay, thank the Lord above, but your prize motor needs $45,000 of repairs. Ouch. However, if your deductible is a mere $500, that’s all you’ll pay towards the cost of those repairs, even though the bill is eye-wateringly expensive.
What will definitely happen, though, is that the following year your premiums will skyrocket because your deductibles are so low. If you’re a safe driver and you don’t mind fronting the cash for repairs when something minor goes down, ask for a higher deductible and the cost of your car insurance will drop like a stone.
Here are two other top tips to get low car insurance:
Own your car. If you’re rolling around the hood in your own auto, you’ll be able to shop around for insurance. If your car is leased, leasing agencies normally stipulate the kind of insurance you’ll have to pay for.
Drive around in a jalopy. If you have the crappiest car on your street, one with so little resale value that you’d have to pay a junkyard to take it off your hands, your insurance will definitely be low. Calibrate the kind of car you drive according to your budget, in other words.