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Temporary auto insurance is simply insurance that covers you during a shorter-than-usual period of time, such as a week or a month, as opposed to a more traditional contract term like a six-month or 12-month period.
You may need one-month car insurance for a variety of reasons, but there are also instances where temporary auto insurance may not be the best idea. In order for car insurance to actually protect you, you need to have active coverage.
There are multiple types of car insurance coverages, but they all have one feature in common: You have to pay your monthly premium for them to truly be effective.
If You’re Going Away to College, Insurance Travels With You
If you’re going to college far away from home, you might wonder what happens to your insurance policy. The truth is your insurance policy travels with you.
In fact, you can reach out to your insurance provider to let them know you will be away from your regular address part of the time due to school. As you might imagine, you aren’t the only student who has multiple addresses based on seasonal time periods.
Letting a Friend Borrow Your Ride
We like to lend things to our friends. If you have a friend who wears the same size shirt, the chances are good that they’ve asked you to borrow a shirt or two over the years. This is the same for cars: when friends need help, they tend to ask people they know first before they try other solutions. It’s a lot cheaper to ask a friend to borrow a car to get back and forth to work than it is for someone to get a rental car.
If you decide to help a friend out, you might look to get temporary insurance for a time when they are using your vehicle. You might have even heard this referred to as non-owner car insurance. However, there is a time and a place for insurance when someone doesn’t have a car.
Understanding Permissive Use
It isn’t when you’re letting someone borrow a vehicle. If someone were to stop driving but wanted to maintain their driver’s license and continuous insurance coverage benefits, they would need to stay insured even if they aren’t driving their own vehicle.
Non-owner car insurance covers those individuals, but even if they don’t have car insurance, your own policy will cover someone borrowing your vehicle. If they had permission to use your car to get from one place to another and they got into an at-fault accident, this is considered permissive use, and most car insurance covers these situations.
Permissive use can also get tricky because even if someone took your keys from a public space within your home, you could still be held responsible for the damages they cause while driving your car. This is why having good car insurance that is always active with premiums paid promptly is truly so critical. Understanding how your car insurance rates go up after an accident is also important.
When Temporary Auto Insurance Is Not a Good Idea
Generally speaking, all insurance is “temporary” in terms of there being no permanent contract. You could simply choose to cancel your insurance policy at the two-week mark and switch to another insurance provider. You could wait a month to see if you like an insurance carrier, get a quote from a different one, and then switch to them as well.
However, there is something called temporary insurance. It just isn’t as advertised as often because insurance companies want to build long-term customers. The best way to get temporary insurance is to work with an insurance agent who can look into more short-term options for you.
Be very clear with them on the exact dates you need the insurance for. If you think you’ll need coverage longer than that, you can just get a quote for a six-month insurance term. If you pay monthly, it could end up being cheaper than the actual “temporary” insurance plans.
Military Absences and Temporary Insurance
One of the other reasons people search for temporary insurance is that they think about military absences. If you aren’t taking your vehicle overseas, the chances are good that you will store it at a stateside location. Whether you have it garaged officially or just parked at your permanent address, the truth is you don’t need temporary insurance for this, either.
You just need to let your insurance carrier know you will not be driving the vehicle and whether anyone else will have access to the vehicle while you are away. For example, some people ask a friend to garage the vehicle and go to the self-storage unit to start the vehicle up every week or two to keep the battery charged up.
Major insurance carriers are well versed in helping service members, so just make sure to give them a call.
Protect Yourself Best Through Traditional Insurance Terms
In most cases, you just don’t need temporary insurance when a six-month term is still the most economical way to ensure you have ongoing coverage for your vehicle. Unless you have a very specific reason, you should always look for your insurance for at least a six-month term.
As we mentioned earlier, car insurance is all about protecting yourself from risk. We can’t prevent every accident, but we can ensure we are always covering ourselves from the possibility of having to pay significant damages out of pocket. This can be especially important if you have a long-term auto loan.
After all, if you were to lose control of your vehicle and hit a telephone pole, could you really pay for it out of your own pocket? That’s the purpose of insurance: We’re paying a little bit every month in the event of an accident that may be beyond our control. We want peace of mind knowing that things are covered, even if it means we may face rate increases in the future.
Letting an Insurance Agent Help With the Road Ahead
Hunting online for the best policy is great, and many people find exactly what they need through this “self-service” option. However, if you know your circumstances are a bit unique or you have some complicated things to work through, it’s time to get an insurance professional on your side.
They have the ins and outs of insurance down to a science, as that’s their profession. Think about it: Wouldn’t you have a great idea of how to help people if you had done something a thousand times or more? That’s the same way an insurance professional views people getting great car insurance.
They’re to be used as a resource, and you can only benefit from their professional opinion. Look at temporary auto insurance, but also know when to call in a professional to assist you. It’s perfectly OK to know you can’t do everything the DIY way.
Luke Williams writes and researches for the auto insurance comparison site, AutoInsurance.org. His passions include best practices for insurance, car ownership, and other ways people can drive with peace of mind.
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