Keeping Your Car Insurance Rates Down With a Teen Driver

Every parent dreads the day his or her teenager starts to drive. Not only is having a teenage driver scary – after all, you can’t help but worry about your teen’s safety – it can also be quite expensive to insure a teenage driver. You really can’t blame the insurance company – teenage drivers are more likely to get into an accident than drivers of most other age groups – but paying the extra expense is certainly a bitter pill for parents to swallow. Fortunately, there are a few steps you can take to help reduce the expenses associated with providing your teenage driver with insurance coverage.

Once your teen gets his or her own set of wheels, you can choose to obtain a separate policy for your teen.Unfortunately, obtaining a separate insurance policy is usually the most expensive option. Therefore, in order to save money, your best option is generally to add the teen and the teen’s car to your insurance policy.

Obviously, adding your teen and the teen’s car to your policy will still cause an increase in your insurance rates, but the increase probably won’t be as much as it would cost to have separate policies. If you are trying to make your teenager responsible for paying for his or her own insurance coverage, you can still do so by putting your teen on your policy.All you have to do is simply have the teenager pay the amount your insurance increases after he or she is added to the policy.

Taking Advantage of Discounts

Depending upon your state and the insurance company you are dealing with, you may have a variety of different discounts that can help you save money on your teen’s insurance coverage.If your teen is a good student that gets good grades, for example, he or she may be eligible for a discount. This is because insurance companies consider good grades to be a sign of responsibility, which means the teen is less likely to get into an accident.

If your teen only uses the car to drive back and forth to school or otherwise only drives a low number of miles, he or she may also be eligible for a low mileage discount. Similarly, your insurance company may decrease the rates if your teen participated in a driver’s education or other driver safety course.

When you add your teen’s car to your policy, you may also qualify for a multi-car discount. A multi-car discount will reduce the amount you have to pay for each car on the policy. Obviously, your rates will still go up overall because you have added a new vehicle to your policy, but the rates you pay on the other vehicles on the policy may actually go down.

You can also keep your insurance rates lower by having your teen select an older vehicle or one that is not a sports model. In general, these types of cars have lower insurance rates than other vehicles, and the same will be true even when the car is driven by a teen.

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