Are you confused about car insurance did you just select the same kind of coverage that your parents did because I don’t know it’s confusing as heck in this video I’m going to walk you through the exact steps to figure out how much car insurance you really need and spoiler alert you have the potential to save big money so stick around hey what’s up it’s just being from debt-free Millennials and the channel for all
Things millennial money and debt free living if you want to learn how to live a debt-free life subscribe to the channel because today I’m walking through car insurance this can be super confusing for a lot of us and I have to tell you I had four separate conversations with my students in budget bootcamp and the freedom project if you don’t know what those programs are I will link to them in the description below but I was talking to
The debt free millennial students and I was shocked because so many of them were in my opinion over pain for car insurance and we had talked about oh well you know my parents had this for my car and then when I got the title I just kind of took the same coverage and while that may be really easy for you to do you could actually be throwing a lot of money down the drain so let’s talk about how much car insurance you really need step one you
Need to understand the three types of car insurance coverages available that includes liability comprehensive and collision okay so liability coverage liability insurance covers any bodily injury or property damage when you have an accident that is your fault in other words if you were to hit somebody your insurance would cover the cost of the repairs to that car or if you caused any harm to the person like physical injury
Liability insurance this is the basic type of insurance that everybody needs it’s illegal to not have this type of insurance so make sure you have it so bodily injury liability think of this as medical cost property damage liability think of this as the cost of the repairs to the car comprehensive insurance covers any kind of repairs to your car that did not result from a collision let’s say your car got broken into a tree branch fell on top of it
Your car caught on fire unexpectedly from a natural disaster hailstorm came around any of those things would be covered by comprehensive insurance and the last type of insurance number three is the collision insurance collision insurance covers the cost of repair for your vehicle if you are involved in an accident and it doesn’t matter whose fault it is whether it is the person who hit you or you hit somebody else collision coverage will cover the cost
Of repairs to your car your own liability insurance does not cover the cost of repairs towards your car unless the other person is at fault and then their liability insurance would cover the cost of your repairs and let’s say that other person didn’t have enough liability insurance to cover the cost of your repairs this is where collision coverage would help you out one important thing to note here is if you have a car loan you may be required to
Have full coverage which means all three types of insurance on your car so while you may not have the opportunity to pick and choose the different types that you want you do have the option to shop around different insurance companies to get the best rate okay step two you need to determine how much car insurance you need I will say this it is a really good idea to maximize your liability coverage now generally most insurance companies will
Max out in three different areas this would include personal injury total injuries per accident and property damage so when you go into your insurance coverage you can log on to your account you should see three different numbers the max generally for personal injury is $250,000 the total injuries per accident is $500,000 and the property damage max is $100,000 now I wanted to show you guys exactly what type of insurance I’m carrying with my
2015 Subaru Forester so you can get an idea but I have maxed out bodily injury and property damage liability – those exact numbers – 5500 and 100 so it’s a good idea for you to max this out if your numbers don’t match mine and to give you an idea of how this would impact your premium I went ahead and went inside of my insurance coverage and I did some changes hypothetically to see how it would impact my rate so from the drop-down menu and I’m on progressive
Right now I could select from the 250 500 100 and let’s say that I just dropped it down to half that 100 per person 300 per accident and 50 per accident and see what that does for my car insurance premium so you can see it actually reduces my premium from 215 dollars and this is paid out every six months to a hundred and ninety seven dollars for a six month premium so my premium overall would drop $14 and 78 cents if I switched within my policy
Period but if you look at the effect of the entire six month period because I pay car insurance every six months which we’ll talk about how that saves you money as well that’s the difference between 2:15 and 197 and it only changes my six month premium by $20.00 so let’s get this straight cutting my liability in half only saves me $20 for six months so it only saves me three dollars and 33 cents per month I don’t know about you
But paying just three dollars extra to literally double my liability I think that’s a pretty good deal so maximizing your liability insurance is key next you’re going to take a look at your comprehensive coverage it’s pretty inexpensive to add so I would suggest including this as well here’s a very important note about comprehensive and collision coverage raise your deductible if you have one thousand dollars in euro ship fund that’s set aside for
Emergencies if you have at least one thousand dollars in savings raise your deductible on your comprehensive and collision coverage and just for kicks I’m going to show you what happens when I reduced my deductible from $1,000 to one hundred dollars okay remember comprehensive insurance covers any repairs to your car that did not result in a collision so these are things like natural disasters theft that sort of thing so when I went into progressive
And I changed my comprehensive deductible from $1,000 to $100 that was a difference between paying twenty three dollars two pain seventy six dollars it actually is a big difference because it costs me fifty three dollars more the change raises my premium from three hundred and eighty dollars every six months to four hundred and thirty three dollars so that’s a difference of about eight dollars and eighty three cents additional per month or one hundred and
Six dollars per year a great way to save even just a hundred dollars per year in my case is just raising my deductible now let’s see how changing the collision deductible from $1,000 to $100 changes things okay so this is insane but when I changed it from a $1,000 deductible for collision coverage which was one hundred and five dollars for a six month premium rate dropping it to one hundred dollars increased my premium to two hundred and
Ninety dollars that’s insane this by far is the biggest swing impacting my premium by lowering my car deductible from $1,000 to one hundred dollars I effectively increased my premium basically the money that you pay towards the car insurance company just to keep your car protected I went from a three hundred and eighty dollars for a six-month period to five hundred and sixty-five dollars that’s a difference of three hundred seventy dollars per
Year if you do anything if you take away anything from this video I highly suggest that you increase your deductible on your collision insurance to one thousand dollars so you’re probably wondering why is that such a big difference in lowering in a lower collision deductible than a higher one well what you are basically telling the insurance company is that you are willing to take on less risk if somebody hits you to pay for that out of pocket
Repair costs then the insurance company and the insurance man be like oh you don’t want to pay more for the collision coverage then we’re gonna charge you more because you are a more risky customer to us and we’re afraid that somebody’s gonna hit you and you’re not willing to pay more upfront out-of-pocket costs that’s why it’s so important to have at least $1,000 in your emergency fund this is the ohshit fund that I keep talking about because
If you have at least that much money you have the opportunity to save yourself some mega bucks on your insurance premium okay so step three is to get multiple quotes from multiple car insurance companies so you’re going to have to do a bit of legwork to shop around but now you know what to look for right liability you are going to max out in my case it was 250 500 100 you’re also going to opt for comprehensive and
Collision coverage with a $1,000 deductible in each got it then you’re going to request and put that out there to different insurance companies now I recently used a tool called Gabby that’s G ABI comm and what I did was I downloaded my coverage policy from progressive I uploaded it into Gabi’s system and I said keep my coverage the same for you you might opt to change your coverage to what I listed out and then they’re going to email you and say
Hey these are all the car insurance company quotes that we selected for you that could be a good fit and then you can opt to choose to switch through Gabby it’s really simple I’m going to drop my link below so that you can sign up and see how it goes because I had already maxed out my liability and my deductible is for comprehensive and collision I actually was told by Gabby that I was getting a good deal so I didn’t make any
Changes and then they’re just going to keep that on record so that if there was a new quote from another insurance company they would be able to notify me and then I can make a switch you do not have to be brand loyal to these auto insurance companies they don’t care they want your money and what I really like about this is I’m okay switching so that I can get the best deal and the best coverage okay once you get the multiple car
Insurance quotes and you’re able to make some adjustments step four is optimize your car insurance to get the best rate now one thing that I really liked about progressive and I know a lot of other car insurance companies do this is you can bundle other insurance policies with car insurance so with progressive i bundled my renter’s insurance and auto insurance into one and we get a slight bundled discount my other trick to saving money on car insurance is opt to
Pay the six-month premium rate instead of the monthly rate when you pay the monthly rate you’re actually paying slightly more than if you were to pay the six-month rate in my case my monthly rate was 72 dollars and my six month rate was three hundred and eighty dollars well when you divide the three hundred and eighty dollars out by six months it only ends up being sixty three dollars so that’s a difference of nine dollars that I’m saving or a hundred and
Eight dollars per year and I don’t know about you but I’d rather save that one hundred and eight dollars for something really nice a really quick trick to do this is simply add in that six-month premium to your budget and budget out for it monthly so it still feels like I am paying my car insurance monthly but instead of giving it to the insurance company I’m just setting it aside in my account and then when that six month is due I will go back in pull that money
Out of my account and pay for it because I’ve already saved up for it monthly I want to mention a side note here your car insurance premium is impacted by your driving history so if you’ve been involved in accidents in the past and recently that could impact your premium rate so take that as a caveat fortunately knock on wood my husband and I have not been involved in an accident I think since we were married we’re really safe drivers I have to say also
If you have an older vehicle your car insurance premium might be a bit higher that’s because insurance companies seem to think that older cars are less safe I don’t know about you but I drove a 2002 Ford Escort zx2 for 1112 years and it was really safe Kyle had driven a 2003 Jeep Grand Cherokee and what was really interesting about that is when we moved to California the insurance premium was 492 dollars for our six month premium and then when we bought our 2015 Subaru
Forester in cash our insurance premium dropped from 492 to 380 because it was a newer vehicle all right so to recap all this I know I unpacked a lot of stuff for you but in order to know exactly what car insurance you need is remember the three types of car insurance types liability collision comprehensive your liability you are going to max out 250 500 100 your comprehensive and collision raise your
Deductible to $1,000 each you’re going to get multiple quotes from multiple companies and make the switch you’re going to optimize pay the six-month premium as opposed to the monthly premium and see how you can bundle other existing insurance policies drop me a comment below was this video helpful was it more confusing I’m going to also link my blog post so that you can see the written steps so that you can pull that up side-by-side as you’re working on
Changing your car insurance so that you can save money I’d love to learn how you’re saving money with the strategy and these insta actions .
