As a responsible car owner, you have kept your vehicle in good driving condition for the last 11 years – taking it for regular oil changes, maintenance checks and washes. Your car almost looks as good as the day you bought it, save for some cosmetic issues, like the scratch on your bumper when you accidentally backed into a retaining wall. And for the last decade, you have had comprehensive coverage on your vehicle. But because your vehicle is now over 10 years old, does it really need so much coverage? With an older vehicle, auto liability insurance is all it takes to keep you covered and feeling safe. To help you figure out what type of coverage you need on your auto, here are five common vehicles we see on the roadways every day that can do without full coverage.
Knowing When to Trim Your Car Insurance
Our cars take us from point A to point B with little to no problem, at least as long as we’ve taken care of it. Part of taking good care of our motor vehicles is getting insurance coverage that protects us and our autos after an accident. Sometimes however, we’re paying more for insurance than our car is actually worth.
One way to determine whether or not you should cut down on your insurance coverage is to know how much your car is worth. Using Kelley Blue Book as our guide, we took 5 popular vehicles and evaluated their worth based on their make, model, year, mileage and condition. In the chart below, you can see that all five vehicle models are priced below $5,000.
MakeModelYearMileageConditionPriceFordXL Pickup 2D 6 ½ ft200595,000Good$4,976HondaAccord LX Sedan 4D200595,000Good$4,561NissanAltima 2.5 Sedan 4D200595,000Good$3,134SubaruLegacy 2.5i Wagon 4200595,000Good$2,814-$3,919ToyotaCamry Sedan 4D200595,000Good$4,064
According to the advice blog Living Stingy, the repair costs of a 10-year-old car after an accident is worth at most $5,000. If your car is not worth the cost of repairs, your insurance adjustor will determine the car has been totaled. This means your insurance company will only pay you what your car is worth. So even if you’ve been paying for $30,000 in coverage, you could only get $4,000 or less in return. This is why it’s important to understand what our vehicle is worth, and how much insurance is really necessary to cover it.
As we know, liability insurance is a requirement in just about every state in the U.S. This means that no matter how much we might cut our auto insurance by, we can never cut out liability insurance. Thus, in cases where our vehicles are 10 years or older and worth less than $5,000, we can probably afford to get a new vehicle should ours be totaled in an accident we did or did not cause. If we did cause the accident, our liability insurance will cover the financial damages of the other driver. This means that either way, we are covered in an accident, we just have to make sure we have the money to buy a new car should the need arise. If we don’t, maintaining our comprehensive coverage is perfectly good too.
At CoverHound we can help you find an auto liability insurance policy that serves you when you need it most. Click here now for your free quote.
Insurance shopping simplified
Insurance shopping simplified
