• Your driving record.

Your driving record shouldn’t be as hard to maintain as people make it out to be. It actually is not that difficult to stay safe on the road, and all you really need to do is go the speed limit or do something just as good, keep your car insurance card on you at all times, and practice defensive driving to avoid accidents.

This is where the different kinds of discounts you get really start to interrelate, starting with this and that defensive driving course. If you think about it, one of the easiest ways to ruin your driving record is with an at fault accident or with a speeding or DUI ticket. Now, more at fault accidents can be avoided than currently are. When many people think of an at fault accident, they are thinking of things like running a stop sign or a red light and plowing into someone, but in most cases it’s a lot more ambiguous than that.

Did you know that the widest spread type of at fault accident involves the at fault driver plowing into the back of the other driver’s vehicle? This is the easiest kind of accident to get into, because it mostly happens when you aren’t paying attention to other drives. People think that the way to avoid an accident is to go the speed limit and watch out for other cars in their rear view mirrors, but there’s danger in the car in front of you as well.

The best way to avoid a rear at fault accident is to practice defensive driving rule number one: keep at least three seconds behind the car in front of you, and five seconds in bad weather. Yeah, people may honk at you and tell you to close the gap, but your car insurance rates are the ones that will go up if you rear end somebody. If you follow these rules and the person in front of you hits the brakes, then you will have plenty of time to stop safely without hitting them. If you hit them, it will be considered your fault because you did not keep a safe distance behind.

• Your credit report.

Keeping your credit report clean is easier said than done, but this can save you thousands of dollars throughout your life, and not just on car insurance. People with good credit reports get better interest rates on their loans, and end up paying thousands of dollars less than others for expensive things like cars and houses. People with bad credit reports end up paying way more.

Your car insurance company says that credit reports correlate to driving ability. People with bad credit reports file more claims, they say, than people with good ones. So having a good one is one of the biggest factors in getting a good high performance car insurance price.

Maybe, but one of the biggest influences on car insurance rates is something that follows many people through most of their lives. The credit score. The credit score is something that you might never have thought of as being a reasonable factor in your auto insurance rates, but the car insurance companies think that it actually does have something to do with driving. Not only are people with better credit scores more likely to be reliable customers who pay their premiums on time and don’t change companies too often, but they also, according to statistical data, file fewer claims than do people with lower credit scores.

Insurance companies take the credit report and make an insurance score out of it. This doesn’t necessarily take into account all of the same factors as does your regular credit score, and is more interested in regular payments than a long history. And these scores are the driving influences of high insurance rates among good drivers.

Their use is heavily debated. There have been lawsuits filed against certain car insurance companies for using these so called insurance scores to decide premiums, and many say that they target low income and minority families, because those are the groups in which people are more likely to have bad credit history. For the moment, now, they must be dealt with.

Cheers,

Fashun Guadarrama.