Reader question:

What kinds of classes can you take to get a discount on your car insurance?

Daisy

Great question.

Do you know what one of the best ways is to get insurance companies to charge you less for your car insurance policy? To convince them what a great, responsible person and driver you are, and how willing you are to put up bumpers to keep your possibly dangerous actions from coming to a bad end. That’s why they love things like people with good driving records, no accident history, who consistently wear seatbelts and drive 5 miles a year at two miles an hour, and whose cars go around in safety bubble forcefields.

That’s the ideal insured person. Not everybody’s going to be like that (okay, nobody), but there are a lot of ways that you can go in that direction and get cheaper rates on safe driver insurance. You can go the route of getting safety features and equipment added on and not speeding in school zones, but there is one very important way that you can get cheaper insurance rates and learn to be a better, more responsible driver, and that is by taking a defensive driving class.

Many people will say that they don’t need a defensive driving class. They are good drivers, have never gotten in an accident, and so on. But there are so many possible situations out there that it is impossible for a person to know just by instinct how to react to them all in order to save themselves and the other driver the most pain possible. Even if you have every kind of electronic stability control or rollover sensing or whatever on your car, there is a point when the machine’s ability to prevent an accident ends and yours begins. If you don’t understand defensive driving techniques, then it isn’t there.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.