Back to school! REALLY???

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With summer winding down and the return to school for many right around the corner now is a perfect time to review your auto insurance. Many parents are unaware that if their college student driver is over 100 miles away from home and will not have access to their car they may qualify for a distant-student discount. These discounts vary by company and may be called something else such as a resident-student discount but in general it is the same principle, that the student is away at college and will not have access to the car.

Be sure if they are attending a local college and still live at home with good grades that you have informed us as this is another important discount that can help save you money. Good Grades deserve good discounts!

With high school student drivers having a good student discount is even more important. There are only a few things that can increase your insurance more than adding a 16 year old to your policy… So a few ways to reduce cost while at least maintaining your current level of protection are: 1. Increase your deductible or reduce your coverage on older cars to liability or liability with comprehensive coverage. 2. See if your company offers a green discount. Simply allow your company to email you documents and bills and get a discount. 3. Look into a auto pay plan, or pay in full plan as this can be a large discount. 4. If you have a collector car or a sports car that isn’t driven much see if it qualifies for a seperate collector policy for that car that the teen will not drive. This would be a restricted use policy and your young driver most likely would be excluded and can not drive that car. While on the subject of cars unless you want to pay an outrageous amount of money for insurance getting little Johnny that Corvette isn’t advised!

One of the most important tips that we recommend is to make sure that you have good liability limits on your policy to begin with. Adding a young driver greatly increases your exposure. If you do not already have a Personal Umbrella Policy it is strongly advised to consider one. If you have lower liability limits we urge you to raise them. Having higher coverages will help provide you much better protection and it also protects you in the event you are hit by someone with low limits or no coverage at all. Now is not the time to look at reducing liability limits which is one of the first things we see happen to people when they start calling around getting quotes. So focused on price the consumer can easily be tricked into accepting a lesser policy. Even when promised it is the same coverage many times the coverage limits aren’t the same.

Enjoy the rest of summer Insurance Family!

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