How To Get Affordable Car Insurance In Maryland
If you drive a car on any public road in Maryland you must have car insurance. That’s the law. If you break this law you are subject to some rather severe penalties which include (but are not limited to) having your registration revoked and having your car’s license plates confiscated. There can be additional penalties as well.
In Maryland you are required to carry liability insurance, uninsured motorist insurance (UM) and you must carry personal injury protection (PIP). If your car is financed then your lender will undoubtedly require that you also carry collision and comprehensive insurance as well.
None of this insurance is free, which has many motorists in Maryland scrambling to get affordable car insurance. Fortunately there are things you can do to help keep the cost of insuring car as low as possible.
The first thing you need to do is to resolve to drive safely and legally. If you receive a speeding ticket not only will you be forced to pay a hefty court fine, your car insurance rates will also skyrocket – and they will remain high for several years to come.
Likewise, if you are convicted of drunk or impaired driving you can expect to pay two or three times as much for your car insurance for quite some time to come. Speeding and driving under the influence are both things that are totally under your control; if you are convicted of any of these offenses you have no one to blame but yourself for your higher car insurance premiums.
If you are in school and you can maintain a “B” grade point average then you can probably qualify for what is called a Good Student Discount, which translates into a monthly savings of about 5% on your car insurance premiums.
If you are 55 or older you may experience a rate increase based on age. However, many insurance companies encourage their older drivers to take a refresher driver’s course; for those who successfully pass such a course the savings on their monthly car insurance premium can be as great as 10%.
If you have an older car, especially one that is fully paid for, you may wish to consider dropping collision and comprehensive coverage. Dropping those coverages will save you considerably on your insurance premiums.
If you drop collision and comprehensive and you are involved in an accident your insurance will not pay for the repair of your vehicle – but to be honest, if your car has little or no Kelly Blue Book value then your insurance would not have paid much, if anything, even if you had paid for the coverage.
The final thing you can do is to increase your deductible. The more money you are willing to pay out of your own wallet any time you have a claim, the less your insurance company will charge you in premiums.
Now that you have designed the best possible car insurance policy for your circumstances it is time for you to get online and compare car insurance policies between different insurance companies and their rates. If you truly want to get affordable car insurance in Maryland then you will need to fill out all of the required information on at least 3 different comparison websites. In this way you will be certain to be comparing all of the car insurance companies in Maryland and you can rest easy knowing that you have truly found the most affordable car insurance in Maryland.