At the end of yesterday’s Daily $$ post I mentioned that I’d received a quote of nearly $1,000 every 6 months (or almost $2,000 per year) to insure our 16yo daughter with her newly minted driver’s license.

After spending the entire morning on the phone with someone in our agent’s office, here’s what we finally came up with:

When you insure a new driver, you have to specify which car you want to insure them on.  Only a fool would choose anything other than their least expensive option — and I’m no fool.  So The Daughter is insured on The Tank.  The Tank is an ‘01 SUV that is completely paid off.  We do carry comprehensive insurance on it because we both think it’s nuts not to.  It’s the older of our two cars but with a lot of life left in it.  To insure The Daughter on The Husband’s not-yet-a-year-old Subaru would have been a much more expensive option.  Mind you, none of this bears any relation to the facts — The Daughter hates driving The Tank and we prefer her to drive the Subaru anyway so when she drives, she drives her dad’s car.

So, anyway, we put her on The Tank.  Next, because The Daughter is a high-risk driver (simply because she’s a new driver; no reflection on her driving skills), her policy is actually written by a subsidiary of Farmer’s — Mid-Century.  Because she’s actually insured by a different company than The Husband and I are, she and I can’t be rated on the same vehicle.  So they shuffled me over onto the Subaru with The Husband.

All of that was fine and dandy but we weren’t done yet.  The Husband commutes to work every day so his vehicle was rated as a “commuter” vehicle.  I, on the other hand, work from home and don’t have a daily commute.  Therefore my car, The Tank, was rated as a “pleasure” vehicle.  But now that The Daughter is rated on the car, it had to be upgraded to a commuter vehicle.

We should have been close at this point but we weren’t.  It turns out that the other woman in the office had somehow managed to classify The Husband and I as “race car drivers.”  [When I heard this I had a hilarious flash through my brain of Paul Newman — the only old man race car driver I know of.  Believe me, The Husband is old and, in my eyes at least, handsome, but he’s definitely not Paul Newman.]  It was a stupid error and I can’t help but wonder how much effort it will require to undo any effects it had on our rates.

Now that The Husband and I are no longer “race car drivers”, the clerk and I were getting closer to the end of our negotiations.

Now we discussed the “good student” discount and the Y.E.S. program discount — discounts can’t be applied to a policy until the policy has been written, apparently, so she couldn’t quote anything with the discounts applied she could only guess at how much they would be.

Yesterday this clerk had mentioned that we could also receive a 10% discount if we paid for the whole 6 months in full.  I was prepared to do just that today but was stymied by the other clerk’s second error — somehow she’d entered the starting date of the policy as being March 24th (the day The Daughter and I went into the office to watch that stupid, time-wasting video).  In order to have qualified for the payment discount I would have had to pay on that date.  I was ticked but it seemed pointless to make a stink about it.  [As I write this it occurs to me that I need to double-check with the office to confirm the starting date for this policy — or more importantly, it’s renewal date.  There is no way I’m going to pay for 1-1/2 months in arrears for time that The Daughter didn’t even yet have a driver’s license.]

At this point we were getting closer to finishing this thing.  The last bit of price-dropping changes we made was to up The Tank’s deductible from $500 to $750.  The Husband later mentioned that we should have taken it up to $1,000 but I’ll leave that detail for a later day.

The end result — after switching drivers, switching car usage classifications, applying discounts, becoming regular-old-Joe drivers again (I’m going to kind of miss being a race car driver — do you think I can put it on my resume anyway?), and adjusting our deductible, the final number came out to $675.50 due every 6 months.

Anyway you look at it, $1,351 per year is a darned sight better than $2,000.  I felt even better about the final number when The Husband pointed out that it’s not an extra $675.50 on top of what we already pay every 6 months.  We were already paying about $500 twice a year to insure The Tank.  In reality, this is only $175.50 more than what our old policy was costing us.  To be sure, an extra $350 every year is worth budgeting for and bearing in mind when deciding whether or not to buy that Starbucks treat next time she asks, but things are looking quite a bit sunnier than they were this time yesterday.

So, if you’re keeping score, today I officially spent $480 paid to Mid-Century Insurance – the minimum amount necessary to purchase this policy (I saw no point in paying the whole thing since I wasn’t going to get the discount).

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