Teaching your teenagers how to drive can feel like you’re embarking on a dangerous journey to Mordor with only your insurance to protect you. When your teenagers are driving on their own, you want your insurance to continue protecting them too, but it means adding them to your coverage. Here’s how adding anyone to your insurance could affect you.

Teenagers

Teenage drivers in particular are an expensive addition to your insurance. As they have less driving experience, they tend to get in more collisions, which leads your insurance agency to charge you more in order to cover the expenses. The increase in premiums for adding teen drivers varies between agencies, but it can generally cost you around $800 to $1,500 more per year.

Spouse

If you’re getting married, adding a spouse to your insurance isn’t half as painful as adding a teen driver. By federal law, it is required that some of your coverage automatically also cover your spouse. However, it is essential that you also add their name to your policy in case they are in an accident while driving your vehicle. The great thing about adding a spouse to your insurance is that your rates could drop if they have a clean driving record.

Occasional Drivers

As it is important to have all your bases covered, if anyone other than yourself or other family member on your insurance policy drives your car, it is important to have them covered. This could be someone who lives with you, like a roommate, or a friend who doesn’t live with you. If you can think of a scenario in which you may lend your car to them, it’s a good idea to add them to your insurance. They should probably add you to their insurance, too. Thankfully this will not cost you as much as adding an inexperienced driver to your coverage.

Elderly

Even if your parents have perfect driving records, their rates will start to increase as they get older. Getting older means losing your perfect vision and hearing, which means slower reflexes while on the road. Adding any elderly drivers to your insurance will cost you more than your average driver, but still less than a teenager. However, if they’re licensed to drive and don’t have a car or any coverage of their own, there can be penalties for not adding them to your insurance.

Insurance Fraud

There are ways to commit insurance fraud without even realizing that you’re doing it. For example, if a driver in your household, but not on your insurance, drives your car and gets in an accident, any claims related to that driver can be denied. As it is insurance fraud, your insurance agency could choose to drop your coverage completely or hold you criminally liable for misrepresentation. On top of that, you wouldn’t have any protection if other parties in the accident decided to sue.

Protect the drivers in your home from any unnecessary charges or difficulties by adding them to your insurance before any accidents happen.