New Car Insurance

Best Value New Car Insurance

You need new car insurance as soon as you own a new car. Even while your new car is still on the lot, if an elehant drops from the sky and crushes it in place, and you don't have insurance, you are the proud owner of a very expensive pancake of scrap metal. Get your new car insurance in place before you finalise the purchase of your new vehicle.

Your new car insurance won't be cheap. As with any major financial decision, you should think carefully, do your homework, and weight your options, to make sure you end up with the new car insurance best suited to your circumstances. Figure out an approximate cost, and set aside the money for the new car insurance before you buy your new car.

Factors Affecting Your New Car Insurance

When pricing their new car insurance, insurers will consider a wide range of variables. The market is competitive, so they want to hold premiums as low as possible, but at the same time, they are in business to make a profit, so they need to charge you enough to cover their overall risk.

For these reasons, insurers will look at the statistics, and try to identify any factor which influences the likelihood of you making a claim, or the size of the claim.

This is why the cost of the vehicle is a major consideration, along with obvious variables like your driving record, and the ages of the regular drivers of the vehicle. If you vehicle has safety features, which make a personal injury claim less likely, or reduce the likely size of a claim, it will reduce your new car insurance premium accordingly. And if your new vehicle is a make or model which is particularly likely to be stolen or damaged, you will, unfortunately, be paying a whole lot more for your new car insurance.

Some insurers consider credit score, hopefully on the basis of statistics, although it is not immediately obvious that there is a direct connection.

There are also factors which you can control to some extent. Many insurers will allow you to choose the amount of your deductible, or excess - this is the contribution payment you make when you make a claim. Some insurers charge you the deductible for every claim, while others will only charge you if you are at fault. The higher the deductible, the less the claim costs the insurer, so choosing a higher deductible can reduce your new car insurance premium.

How To Get New Car Insurance

In many cases, you can get temporary insurance cover when you buy a new car. This temporary insurance is called a "cover note". Most major insurers will issue a cover note over the phone. You then have anything from three days to 30 days to complete the paperwork required for your proper new car insurance.

It is important to shop around for your new car insurance. Make sure you read the fine print on your new car insurance policy before signing. Some insurers lower their premiums by excluding certain things, like fire and flood damage, which you would expect them to cover.

In the state of California, a citizen-initiated referendum put a ceiling on car insurance premiums. The result of this was that many insurers cut back dramatically on what is covered, to keep costs down. If you move to California from another state, you can't assume that new car insurance will be anything like what it was back home.

You will have to live with your new car insurance for along time. Usually, you won't discover any problems until you try to make a claim. By properly reading the fine print, you protect yourself from unpleasant and expensive surprises.

This article is an extract from Mark Bennett's comprehensive guide on finding new auto insurance, which is available from AllFinanceAdvice.com.

Mark Bennett is a staff writer for AllFinanceAdvice.com, and contributes regularly to other authoritative financial websites and publications.