What effect does completion of a drivers education program have on insurance rates? The answer? It depends primarily on the insurance company and your state’s requirements. However, completion of the right driver’s ed program can qualify you for an insurance discount, usually between 15-20%.

From personal experience, it really pays to shop around as rates can vary dramatically! Here’s our “story in a nutshell”.

When my homeschooled granddaughter was ready to get her license, we began checking insurance rates for an older car. We were looking only for the mandatory liability insurance. Her mom would be the primary driver, my granddaughter the secondary occasional driver.

We began our search with the insurance agent we had been with for over 10 years and for the barest minimum coverage the quote was 1200 dollars per year. WHOA!!! We continued on our quest, checking other local companies and then the big online insurance names. Quotes ranged from 1000-2200 dollars per year! I was shocked & depressed!

As a last resort, I checked with one more local agent that we had heard good things about. She came back with a quote of 500 dollars per year, using the same company as our current agent had checked, and the coverage was considerably better! A 700 dollar difference and better coverage!!!

And yes, we did get a significant discount because our granddaughter had a “Certificate of Completion” from a drivers ed course she took as part of her home education. We also got an additional discount because of her good grades.

(Needless to say, we had the new agent check our policies and, again, for better coverage than we currently had, she reduced our premium by 50%. We switched agents )

So….where to begin?

1. The first place to start is to know your state insurance requirements for new drivers. DMV.org has an easy to use map to find out all the requirements, by state, for new drivers.
2. Read this well written article, Insurance Rates & Discounts, by Cars.com. The article is divided into two parts, each of which include issues related to new drivers:
   • Factors that affect your insurance rate
   • Discounts to request

Armed with this information, you are ready to begin your search for the best insurance rates. Don’t be discouraged, keep shopping!

Next time we’ll look at some free online resources for Driver’s Education and then wrap the series up with paid Driver’s Ed programs that work well in a homeschool setting. There are a number of good free & paid Drivers Ed resources available, but you will still have to do the legwork to find out which ones will qualify for an insurance discount in your state.

Until then,
Sue

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 9:31 am and is filed under Home Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.