If you live in New York and want to drive a car, it is a good idea to make sure that you understand the New York auto insurance codes. Understanding the laws that govern how much insurance you need and what type is important to making sure that you have enough coverage in case of an accident and don’t have more than you need since this could mean paying a lot more for your insurance.
The first thing you need to understand is that under New York auto insurance codes you are required to have insurance to drive at all, or even to register your car. If you let your insurance lapse you are going to have to pay daily fines or you could get into even more legal trouble.
This means you need to make paying your insurance premiums a priority. If you know you are going to have a lapse in coverage you can avoid fines by turning in your license plates to the DMV during the time of the lapse.
Not only do the New York auto insurance codes require you to have insurance, they require you to have a certain amount of coverage and various types of coverage, including no fault coverage, bodily injury coverage, uninsured motorist coverage, and property damage coverage.
These amounts are the bare minimum, and depending on your situation you might want to get more coverage in one or more of the different areas, such as bodily injury coverage, since medical expenses can be quite high. If you have a car that isn’t worth much you might not want to worry about having too high a coverage for repairs, but if you have an expensive car you might want to raise the amount.
Another thing that is regulated by the New York auto insurance codes is where you can get your insurance. You have to get your insurance through a New York company that is registered with the New York State Insurance Department.
Although in some ways this limits the number of companies that you might have to choose from, there are still a lot of different options available and some competition between them to help keep the prices somewhat lower than they might otherwise be.
Once you understand what coverage you have to have it will be easier to figure out what you can do to get lower insurance rates while still being in compliance with the New York auto insurance codes. One of your options when you can’t decrease the amount of coverage you have is to increase the deductible on your insurance policy. This means that you agree to pay more money in the case of an accident before the insurance policy will kick in and cover the rest.
By doing this, you can usually lower your payments significantly, so it is worth checking into. Be sure you don’t increase your deductible so much that you wouldn’t be able to pay it in case of an accident however. It is a good idea to make sure you always keep this amount in savings in order to be ready in case of an accident.
