Types of Insurance / Car Insurance / Cheap Car Insurance
We've collected millions of car insurance quotes to help you find the cheapest insurance available. This data — much richer than anecdotal experience or conventional wisdom — informs our opinions about buying insurance in a way no other website can.
In some states we have additional tips on getting cheaper car insurance. See a detailed chart and price comparison for your car insurance by clicking your state below. Or keep reading to learn how to save on car insurance anywhere.
Most of what you are paying for with insurance is the privilege of having someone with deeper pockets pay for the damages caused by you or to you when something goes wrong — like an automobile accident or a tree falling on your car when it’s parked in your driveway.
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You can’t negotiate rates with the insurance company because prices aren’t flexible. There are some things you can do to lower your premiums in general, but for the most part, the only two meaningful levers you have when buying car insurance are choosing your coverage and choosing your deductible. To some extent you can also choose what is covered.
Your coverage limit is how much the insurance company will pay when you have a claim. Your deductible is how much you will pay BEFORE the insurance company pays anything against that claim.
See how different coverage amounts affect your premium and how different deductibles do, too.
There are thousands of factors that determine how much your insurance costs, and everybody’s situation is somewhat unique. The basic influences are: your driving record, the cost of repairing or replacing your car, how much coverage you choose, and what you pay for your deductible.
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You only have control over some of these details when you shop for insurance, so it’s a good idea to learn which ones and what to do about it.
Theoretically the amount of coverage you choose should be the single most important factor in determining your car insurance premium as it is literally what you’re paying for — the coverage.
It is true that the more coverage we elect, the more our premiums will cost. A little known fact is that premiums cost a lot more when you jump from minimum coverage to middling coverage, but do they jump a lot more when you elect great, asset-protection coverage? Let’s find out.
In Texas, drivers with cars valued between $35k and 45k, with the legal minimum coverage for bodily injury ($60k for all injured parties per accident) and $25k for property damage per accident, pay an average of $91 per month.
Increase the coverage to $100k for total bodily injury coverage per accident and the premium goes up to $139 per month. That’s a 53% increase in premiums for a 66% increase in coverage — not too bad, especially since $100k will cover most accidents fully.
What if we increase the coverage another 3x to $300k? The average premium only goes up 7%! That’s because there are many fewer accidents that cause between $100k-300k in bodily injury (thank goodness).
Imagine how life changing that $200k would be if you had to pay it out of pocket… You might have to sell your house or empty your retirement savings. That seems like a great deal for peace of mind if something huge goes wrong.
Find out what the right amount of coverage is for your personal situation with Coverage Cat.
Although a higher deductible ought to make your premium decrease, it doesn’t always work that way in practice.
For example, using Coverage Cat’s experience observing millions of auto quotes, cars valued between $35k and $45k in Texas have an average monthly premium of $218 with a $500 deductible and a $131 premium with a $750 deductible. By increasing the deductible by just $250, the average driver saves $87 a month — this pays for itself in three months!
Here’s where it gets even weirder… If we raise the deductible to $1000, we expect the premium to go down further, right? Nope! The average premium kicks back up to $190 per month! Prices in insurance don’t always make sense.
Now if you didn’t have all this data like we do at Coverage Cat, how could you possibly know which deductible was going to save you the most money?
Let us help you optimize your car insurance.
There are a lot of factors which go into your car insurance premium. That doesn’t mean you need to pay attention to all of them. Here are a few factors where you can move the needle.
Sometimes in life cheaper is better — if you don’t care about how long an item might last because you’re only using it for a short time anyway, or you don’t care if that tomato was grown organically, or that adorable dog from the pound only cost $75 instead of thousands for the pedigreed version from a breeder.
Other times, cheaper is not better. We’d argue car insurance is probably not the optimal place to cheap out. If you don’t have any expensive assets — you drive an inexpensive car and you don’t own a home — you probably don’t need “full coverage” insurance (that doesn’t exist by the way).
There are plenty of situations where you might want more than the basic minimum required by law. Here are two surprisingly common ones:
At the end of the day, when you get in an accident that costs more than your insurance policy pays out, you pay the difference. If your bodily injury damages are way higher than your policy limit — not hard to imagine with healthcare costs being what they are — the other party can sue you for all you’re worth.
Rather than try to figure out the secret sauce yourself, let Coverage Cat do all the legwork for you. We’ll find your perfect insurance, and we’ll tell you what it is whether we can sell it to you or not.
The bottom line is that only your final quote really matters, not all of the specific factors which contribute to it.
One of the most little known facts about car insurance is that you are not stuck with it for a whole year after you enroll in a new policy. You should recheck your car insurance rates every year, but there are other times to consider shopping around, too.
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