25 May 2017
 Categories: Insurance, Blog

Do you have a teenage child who has started driving only recently? Has he or she already gotten into several accidents that have resulted in much higher insurance premiums? While banning your child from driving for a while can be a reasonable punishment at times, it's not going to solve the issue of high insurance premiums. That's something that can take the involvement of both you and your child. In order to get your insurance rates to go down again, here are a few solutions that you should consider:

Insist on higher grades.

 Before your teen can get his or her driving privileges returned, you should consider insisting that he or she gets better grades in school. Although this may seem arbitrary to your child, insurance companies are often willing to extend lower rates to teens or the parents of teens who have been getting good grades in school. It's even possible that you'll wind up with slightly lower insurance premiums than you had before your child got into any accident. Not every insurance company will do this, so you may want to consider switching to a new company if it turns out that yours doesn't have discounts of this sort. 

Choose driver's education courses.

Your teen probably already took driver's ed in school and may even have gotten a good grade. However, his or her accidents are a sign that he or she either has forgotten things or didn't pay as much attention in class as you might want. Before letting your kid drive again, you may want to insist that he or she attends a juvenile remedial course. This type of course will cover things that he or she learned, or should have learned, in school such as when to use a turn signal or how much distance he or she needs to leave between the car that he or she is in and the car directly ahead of them. A juvenile remedial course may also cover basic defensive driving skills that will enable him or her to avoid or minimize accidents in the future. Check with your insurance company to find out which companies provide certificates valid for discounted insurance rates.

Install a monitoring device.

There are a few insurance companies that will lower your insurance premiums if you agree to have a tracking device installed in your car. Such devices don't necessarily report your location back to the insurance company. Instead, they simply record the distance driven and the speeds used to get there. It may also record the number of hard braking incidents along the way, such as might occur when missing a stop sign or going too fast in traffic. As long as your teen actually puts the things learned in the juvenile remedial course to practice, you could see dramatically lower insurance costs.