Do You Need Car Insurance?
You own your car. You’re a good driver. You don’t find yourself navigating heavy traffic, traveling down treacherous mountain roads or parking your auto in dangerous neighborhoods. You’ve been driving for years and have never had a problem.
Do you need car insurance?
Absolutely. Even the best drivers in the safest places need quality coverage. Here’s why:
The Law
In almost every jurisdiction, without exception, automobile insurance coverage is compulsory for all vehicles. If you don’t have coverage, you’re breaking the law. If you’re stopped and don’t have car insurance, you can face steep fines and other potential forms of punishment.
The Lender
Unless you own your car outright, free of all loans and liens, car insurance is unavoidable. Lenders want to protect their collateral on auto loans–your vehicle–from any unnecessary elimination of value. They’ll generally make maintenance of quality automobile insurance part of the loan’s terms and may be legally entitled to repossess an uninsured car or to purchase much more expensive coverage on the vehicle and to charge you for its cost!
The “Other Guy”
You may be a great driver, capable of slicing through rush hour traffic and handling hairpin curves. Unfortunately, you’re not the only driver on the road. Your insurance doesn’t protect you from your own driving errors, it shields you from those of others. You don’t want to find yourself with a crushed car, a broken leg and a ceiling-high stack of bills because another slow-reflexed driver was trying to read the newspaper and drink a cup of coffee while having a cell phone conversation during his morning commute. Car insurance protects you from the “other guy”. That becomes crystal clear when you discover that many of the worst drivers on the road are foolish enough to drive without insurance of their own. If you’re not protected by your own policy, you’re at risk.
The Inevitable
Eventually, it will happen. Your foot will slip ever so slightly and your bumper will smack the car in front of you. Your tire will spin on a virtually invisible layer of ice and you’ll slide into a guardrail. You’ll be thinking about an urgent situation at home or work and you won’t notice the stop sign. Something will happen. No one’s luck holds out forever. When that one anomalous piece of bad luck arrives, you want to be ready to deal with it. That’s what insurance is all about. It protects you from the unforeseen. It’s your shield against bad luck.
The Money
When your car takes a dent after an accident, suffers dents from hail, or suffers any other damage, you’re going to need to fix it. Those repairs aren’t cheap. In fact, they can be quite expensive. Would you rather find yourself forced to pay $5,000 for a necessary repair or would you prefer to cover nothing more than a manageable deductible? It’s not a difficult choice. In many cases, drivers are literally unable to pay the money they need to repair their vehicles. Compared to real repair costs, insurance can be a real bargain–and it may be the only thing that keeps you on the road.
If you’ve been considering driving without insurance, think again. Driving without insurance is an illegal, dangerous and potentially costly decision that increases your risk exposure unnecessarily.
