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In the United States, there are two main types of automobile insurance: collision policies and liabilities policies. The laws in most states require that the automobile owner carry at least liability insurance on any vehicles which are used on the road. The law doesn't require you to carry collision insurance, but most lenders require that you carry collision insurance if you are still making payments on your car to the lender.
COLLISION INSURANCE
Collision insurance is the insurance policy which pays for damages to your car if you are in an accident and you are the one at fault in the accident. Your insurance policy will pay for costs up to the fair market value of your vehicle. In addition, often the fair market value of the car is less that the amount which you still owe on the vehicle. For this reason, you may want to look into gap insurance.
COMPREHENSIVE INSURANCE
Comprehensive insurance is similar to collision insurance, except that comprehensive insurance pays for damages to your car when you are not at fault. Comprehensive insurance also pays for vehicle damages for things like vandalism, floods, storms and other acts of God. The amount of premium cost that you pay for comprehensive and collision insurance is affected by the amount of deductible which you pay on your policy.
Motorists often choose deductible amounts of $250, $500, or $1000. These figures are the amount you pay in repair costs first, before the insurance policy kicks in. Obviously, the more that you are willing to pay, the less the insurance company will need to pay, thus lowering the cost of the premium to you.
LIABILITY INSURANCE
Liability insurance pays for all expenditures related to repairing any other cars involved in the accident. Liability doesn't cover repair costs for your own vehicle, since comprehensive and collision insurance covers those costs. There is a risk in liability insurance, since if the accident is your fault, you will have to pay for repairs to your own car.
As soon as you no longer are required to pay premiums for collision insurance, it will save you money in premiums to reduce the collision coverage. You need to make sure you are protected as well as can be from the financial results of personal repairs cost due to an accident. You should take into consideration, for instance the value of your automobile. If it has a value of $1000 $1500 you probably should drop the policy. If your $1000 car suffers $800 worth of damages in an accident, but the premiums on your $500 deductible policy are costing you $300 per year, it just doesn't make financial sense to continue to pay insurance premiums.
If you are driving a $30,000 car though, it makes sense to continue to carry collision insurance. In order to pay smaller premiums, you can increase the deductible on the policy. You will need to determine how much risk you can afford to carry yourself and how much will need to be covered by the insurance company.