How to Buy Car Insurance

If you own and drive a car anywhere in the United States of America, you are required by state law to carry automobile insurance on that vehicle to protect yourself and others financially in the event of an accident. Since auto insurance is something you have to buy in our society, it’s a safe bet that there is someone out there just dying to sell it to you. In fact there are a lot of “someones,” hundreds of insurance companies all competing for your business. If you don’t know how to buy car insurance or have never done so in the past, you need to know what to look for and how to shop around to avoid paying too much for your necessary insurance coverage.

Shopping Around Online

One of the things that the Internet has done is make buying car insurance a lot easier than it used to be. In the past, getting an insurance quote involved calling or visiting an insurance agent and going through quite a bit of paperwork and answering many questions. All this, just to find out the price of the insurance! If you didn’t like the price you were given then you either lived with it or went through the entire process again with another insurance agent. The reasons for this were twofold. The insurance companies knew that if people went through a time consuming process just to get a quote they would be less likely to look elsewhere for their insurance coverage. An old adage in the insurance game was “Once they’re in your office, they’re yours.” And it was true in a lot of ways. Secondly, the technology didn’t exist to give insurance quotes all that quickly. Agents and insurance companies could give good estimates, but the actual cost of the insurance was always determined by underwriters.

Now almost all insurance companies can provide online quotes. These insurance quotes are available in about a minute or so after filling in an online form. This makes it very easy to compare the prices of several insurance companies before deciding which insurer to use. The easiest answer when someone is asking how to buy car insurance is now “Go online.”

What to Look For

When searching for car insurance it is important to know what type of insurance is required in your state and how much of it, as well as how much coverage you actually need. The amount of insurance coverage that you need is seldom the same as what is required by law. Most states require only liability insurance, which protects you in the event that you cause a car accident. When you buy a new car, however, the financer will likely require that you carry a comprehensive or “full coverage’ insurance to protect them in the event that the car becomes a total loss due to an accident, fire, theft, etc. You’ll probably want even more coverage than that because, while the typical “full coverage’ policy will pay for the car when one of these things happens, it will not also replace it.

Even if you are carrying only liability insurance, the amounts required by law in many states are somewhat unrealistic. For example, many states require only 10/20/10 insurance coverage which means you are covered in an accident caused by you for up to twenty thousand dollars’ in injuries, with a maximum of ten thousand per injured party, and up to ten thousand total in property damages. A serious auto accident can cause injuries and damages that far exceed those amounts, so it is usually a good idea to purchase additional insurance coverage.

Buying auto insurance can be confusing to some people, but with the modern processes for purchasing policies and getting quotes, it doesn’t have to be intimidating, time consuming, or frightening anymore.