14 Car Insurance Discounts That Can Help Save Money
Do you know that there are various car insurance discounts being offered by different insurance companies outside there that can help you save some amount on your premium? What of if you are able to save something like 25% or more from what you currently pay as car insurance premium? Can you imagine the difference that the savings will make in your personal finance? In some cases, people that complain of paying high car insurance rates are the one to be blamed. If you consider that your car insurance premium is high, it is possible that you don’t know what to do to bring it down. In this article, I will be sharing with you some discounts which one can use to bring his insurance rates down. However, one may not qualify for all the car insurance discounts that will be discussed here. At least, you can find one or two discounts that will be applicable to you. If you want to make most of the car insurance discounts, you may need to shop around. If one insurance company is not offering the kind of discounts you qualify for, another company may offer you.
Common Car Insurance Discounts
In no particular order, below are some of the car insurance discounts that you can take advantage of in lowering your car insurance rates.
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- Bundling Discounts: If you have more than one insurance policy, bundling them together with one insurance company may save you money. For you to qualify for this type of this discount, the insurance policies may not be related. For example, you can bundle your car insurance with homeowners insurance or renters’ insurance. Just like any business, if your transactions is huge, that is, you buy in a large quantity, the seller of the product you are buying may offer you quantity discount. This is applicable to insurance policies too. Bundling your insurance policies with one company increases your negotiation power. Your car insurer will definitely not like to lose you to competitors. For this reason, the company may not mind reducing your premium if that will help them keep you as their customer.
- Multi Car Discounts: For people that have two or three vehicles, if you insure all of them in a single policy, this will be cheaper than insuring the cars individually. This alone can save you average of 15% of your insurance premium
- Association Discounts: Surprisingly, you may not necessarily need to have more than one car before you can enjoy multi-car discounts. If you work in a big organizations or you belong to an association, you can liaise with your colleagues and approach insurance companies with one voice. If say like ten people decide to insure their cars with one insurance company, you can leverage on this to enjoy very attractive discounts. If you want to maximize this type of opportunity, you may decide to get different quotes from three or four companies. Creating a sort of competition among the insurance companies will make them offer their best rates.
- Good Driver Discounts: You can also call this safe driving discounts. If you have been driving consecutively for three to five years without getting involved in an accident in which you are at fault or you don’t have record of violating traffic rules, you will be considered a safe driver. Ask your insurer if they offer this kind of car insurance discounts. If they don’t, it may be a good time for you to shop around. In fact, this is the type of drivers insurance companies will be glad like to have as their customers.
- Good Student Discounts: If you are a teen or young driver, you should expect to pay high car insurance rate. However this notwithstanding, you may be able to bring the rate down if you have good grade in your academic. Some insurance companies reward students and teens by offering them good student rates. The rationale behind this is that, it is assumed that for a student to have a good grade, he or she must be a serious minded individual that doesn’t have time galvanizing around. Instead of driving recklessly around going from one night party to the other, good students will possibly sit with their books. This type of students will hardly get involved in an accident. Therefore, if you have a good grade, you should let your car insurer know about it. It is a good way of lowering your car insurance premium. Please note that good student discounts are only available to students.
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- Student away discounts: Car insurance can become very expensive when parents decide to add their young adults to their car insurance policy. But if your young adults will be away for a full time study in a college that is one hundred away from home, you may be able to reduce the premium through distant student discounts. In a bid to cut their car insurance premium, some parents usually drop their young adults from their insurance policy when they know that the students will be away from home for some time. Of course, this will definitely help them lower their car insurance premium. This practice will only work effectively if the student doesn’t come home regularly and will not drive while away. Otherwise, he may be driving without insurance. Besides, taking your young students off your policy may deny him having driving records. This will still make his rate to be high when he wants to buy car insurance policy in the future. Therefore, instead of removing the young student from the policy completely, distant students discounts can help you save money while the student still enjoy driving record.
- Training discounts: If you are under 21 years old and you have completed defensive training course, and you have necessary documentation to show that you have completed the course, you will qualify for defensive training discounts. Defensive training course helps young drivers to learn about different traffic laws, defensive driving techniques that can help them prevent or avoid accidents. They are also taught on how they can drive in adverse weather condition. If you attend other driving courses which can improve your driving skills or exhibit safe driving behaviour, it can also help you earn driving training discounts. However, some insurance companies will only grant discounts for only approved education training courses
- Low mileage discounts: If you don’t drive your car on long distance or you don’t drive your car to work, you can enjoy low mileage discounts. Keeping your car out of the roads will actually reduce the likelihood of being involved in an accident.
- Pay in full discount: If you take time to study how insurance companies charge their rates, you will notice that the rates per annum are usually cheaper than the rates for monthly or quarterly payments. So, if you have the money to pay your car insurance rate in full instead of making monthly or quarterly payments, you will be able to enjoy pay in full discounts.
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- Auto-renewal discounts: You can allow your car insurer to deduct your car insurance premium from your account or credit card automatically any time it is due for renewal. This makes the administration to be easy for your car insurer. For this, you can enjoy auto-renewal discounts. However, you must ensure that you always have enough cash or credit in your account and credit card respectively.
- Occupational Discounts: There are certain professions that demand that you are constantly on the roads. This makes them to be risky in term of car insurance. On the other hand, certain professionals such as marine engineers who are always away on the sea may attract occupational car insurance discounts.
- Loyalty discounts: If you have remained with the same insurance company for some time like 5 years, you may be able to enjoy loyalty discounts. But the problem with this is that, not all insurance companies offer this type of discount.
- New car discounts: Is your car new? It will be nice if you can find out insurance companies that offer new car discounts. It is natural for people with new car to drive with utmost care, thereby limiting the probability that the car will involve in an accident. But if you have history of claims, you may nullify the discount.
- Other vehicle discounts: If your car has anti-lock brakes, airbags, alarms and tracking systems that are factory installed which can enhance your safety and that of your passengers, you can enjoy discounts.
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You should understand that the car insurance discounts enumerated above are not automatic. You may need to place demand on your car insurer before they grant you the discounts. And if you know that there are discounts you qualify for which your car insurer does not offer or is not willing to grant you, you may decide to look elsewhere.