If you are a young driver, perhaps the biggest headache to keeping your own car on the road is the sheer cost of insurance. Whether or not you agree that your age automatically translates into a higher risk of accidents and claims, the fact is that most insurance companies seem to think that is the case – leaving you little opportunity but to pay up for high price young drivers insurance.
In fact, you may still have a number of options when it comes to young drivers insurance:
Specialist providers
- your youth may mean that you need a special type of insurance and if that is what you need it might make a great deal of sense to consult a specialist provider of insurance for young drivers;
- here at GSI Insurance, we recognise and have a great deal of sympathy for the difficulties encountered by young drivers – we want to help you to stay on the road without it costing you an arm and a leg;
Minimising the risks
- but there are also things you may do for yourself – predominantly those measures that hep to minimise the risks that you are asking an insurer to take on;
- there are a number of ways of doing this and probably the most popular is to minimise the risks by sharing more of them with your insurer – and the way to do that is to accept a further voluntary excess on top of the compulsory excess invariably applied;
- although this might help reduce the cost of your insurance premiums you need to bear in mind whether you are going to be able to afford the whole of the excess payment in the event of a claim;
- an investment that is also likely to earn you a reduction in insurance premiums lies in the installation of anti-theft alarms and devices;
Level of insurance
- many younger drivers might automatically assume that the basic legal minimum and lowest level of insurance cover is going to be the cheapest;
- in fact, this is not always the case and you might find that comprehensive cover actually works out to be a cheaper buy than third party cover only;
Who’s driving?
- if it is your car and you are the one that is going to be driving it, do not be tempted to claim to your insurer that it in fact belongs to your father and you are simply a named driver;
- such misrepresentation is called “fronting” and amounts to the serious offence of insurance fraud – any claim may be avoided by the insurer and, as the fraud squad are keen to point out, may end you up in trouble with the police to boot;
- on the other hand, there is no misrepresentation involved in adding a further, experienced and more mature named driver to your insurance policy – often reducing the cost of your premiums by doing so.
Being a young driver need not be all doom and gloom, therefore. There are ways of minimising the risks and reducing your premiums – particularly if you make use of the services of a specialist provider of young drivers insurance.