Cheap California Auto Insurance

By Melanie Ullman
The West coast is considered by many to be a dream place to live and work, but finding cheap California auto insurance may be a deterent. In California you can have wonderful sandy beaches, gorgeous mountains and the ancient Redwood forests. There are a number of National Parks and sites to visit and see on vacation, but if you are moving there you will need to buy California car insurance. Just like almost everything in California, they have different rules and requirements for driving, registering and insuring your vehicle. They have stricter emissions standards and stricter insurance standards.

Aside from the fact that California registration fees are tied to the current value of your vehicle your California car insurance will be the second highest cost of car ownership. Here are some of the minimum requirements for carrying insurance in California. The absolute minimum you need to carry is liability coverage. The minimum levels you need to have are $15,000 for the death of one person in one accident and $30,000 for the death of more than one person in one accident. In addition you need to have $5000 in property damage coverage for any one accident. The cost for this coverage in California averages about twice the premium for someone with the same car in downtown Cleveland or Columbus.

There are four methods to satisfy these minimum requirements for the state of California liability insurance. The first is buying a policy from a regular insurance company; you can make a cash deposit of $35,000 with the state of California Department of Motor Vehicles; if you own a fleet of more than 25 vehicles you can file a certificate of self insurance with the DMV and finally you can provide a surety bond in the amount of $35,000 issued by a recognized insurance company licensed in the state of California. All of this is predicated on you owning the vehicle in question completely without any liens or loans.

If you have purchased a vehicle with an installment loan or have leased the vehicle and need California car insurance your requirements are much higher. In general no matter what state your vehicle is registered in you will be required by your bank or your lease company to carry full coverage with a deductible of $500 or less on both comprehensive and collision coverage. This is in addition to the liability coverage required on all vehicles.

When choosing a company to provide for your needs for cheap California auto insurance, there are a number of things to consider other than just getting the best rate. You can have a great rate quote, but if the insurance company providing the quote is not rated well by AM Best (B+ or higher) you may run the risk of the company going out of business when you need to make a claim. Also, once you get some quotes, take the two best quotes and check out their customer service by calling their claims lines and seeing just what it takes to get through to a live person. It does not matter how low your insurance is if you can not get service when you need it most.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under Cheap California Auto Insurance, cheap auto insurance. 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.