Young Driver Car Insurance

If you are currently looking for young driver car insurance for the first time, and wondering how much coverage you need. Most advice that have been seen says; take net worth or $100k, whichever is higher. When you get insurance, you are protecting yourself against those rare but really expensive risks.
If you are currently looking for young driver car insurance for the first time, and wondering how much coverage you need. Most advice that have been seen says; take net worth or $100k, whichever is higher. When you get insurance, you are protecting yourself against those rare but really expensive risks. However, with a $100k limit, you might get the impression that you are protecting against the big risks, but not against the really big risks.

What happens if you get into an accident, you have liability coverage for $100k, and somebody in the other car has $500k worth of hospital bills as a result? Your insurance company won't pay and you can't afford that much money. So do you go bankrupt and the injured person not get treatment?

One possible scenario is that the plaintiff's lawyer recognizes that you are noncollectable above the policy limit, and the plaintiff settles in the amount of the policy limit even though it doesn't cover all of his losses. The greater your income and assets, the greater the risk that somebody will seek an judgment against you in excess of your insurance coverage.

If a person has several hundred thousand dollars of medical bills and the driver at fault has minimal insurance coverage. If the driver has little or no assets beyond the coverage, the injured person often ends up in bankruptcy to discharge the medical bills. Certainly under insured and uninsured coverage is extremely important to have in this era as medical costs continue to skyrocket.

The victim's health insurance pays for medical expenses except the first small amount covered by the auto insurance medical coverage (usually only a few k$).

The insurance company pays the victim on the condition that they will not sue. Thus the victim has the choice between taking a certain dollar amount from the insurance company, or going through the risk and expense of a trial. Thus if your net worth is less than your policy limit it is not in the victim's best interest to sue.

Improvements in car design and increased use of seat belts (which are not superfluous in this era of air bags) has created a context where most people injured in car accidents would still be looking at a <$100K recovery, but where the more serious injuries can be vastly more serious - that is, the >$100K claims can involve extremely serious injury or death with potential damages claims being very high. Does all this mean that the streets are full of under insured drivers and that when there is a nasty accident the people involved end up broke? Yes. Worse, the worst drivers tend to carry the least insurance, due to cost and limited availability. It's not unusual to see habitual drunk drivers with 20/40 coverage.

You can discuss with your insurance agent the relative cost of coverage - sometimes a significant increase in coverage isn't that expensive as compared to the cost of the policy - or alternatives, such as umbrella coverage. Also discuss uninsured and under insured motorist coverage, to protect yourself. In helping you to find young driver car insurance and the coverage you need compare cheap car insurance.

By Brent A. Kenny
Published: 1/23/2008
 
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