Do you remember when you were a teenager and your parents were trying to decide how much insurance you were really going to need before they could let you hit the friendly highways? If you were like most young drivers you spent the better part of your high school years cruising around town in a beat up clunker that cost less than your parents' dining room table. You were just happy to have a set of wheels, and your parents loved the cheap auto insurance.

Now that you're an adult the decision making about your auto insurance policies falls on your shoulders, and you've got to be the one to decide how much auto insurance your car really needs.

When you purchase a brand new car from a dealer auto insurance is a non-issue. Why? Because you have to have it, and you have to have a lot of it. Your dealer (or lender, if you decided to finance through another company) wants to make sure they weren't going to lose out on their investment (your loan) if you accidentally totaled your car on the way off the lot, so they require you to carry full coverage (comprehensive, collision, liability and uninsured motorist) as a part of your loan agreement.

When you don't have a choice decisions about your auto insurance are easy. Take away those mandatory guidelines and the situation gets a little stickier. When you were a teen your parents probably had the bare minimum amount of auto insurance coverage on you, mostly because they'd have paid more to keep comprehensive and collision insurance on your car for a couple of months than the car was actually worth! Many of us roll into adulthood with that same attitude and put the bare minimum amount of liability on our cars without really thinking about the consequences.

Yes, there is some foundation to the argument that clunkers aren't really worth the cost of the premiums to keep full coverage on them, but before you toss your extra benefits aside in favor of cheap auto insurance rates take a second to think about what's going to happen if you're in an accident:

• Is your minimum liability going to be enough to cover all the damages if you're in a major accident, or are you going to be left holding the bag for thousands of dollars above your insurance limits? When you start adding up the cost of emergency and ICU medical car and the never ending list of things that can need fixed on a car the minimum coverage levels start looking puny in comparison!

• Do you have enough money in your savings account (or is your credit good enough) to buy another car if you or Mother Nature total yours and you aren't covered by a good comprehensive or collision insurance policy? You don't want to throw your money away, but having $2,000-3,000 to put a down payment on a new car is better than nothing-and might make the difference between buying a new car and walking to work for the next couple of months.

When you're trying to decide how much auto insurance your clunker really needs it's best to go ahead and play the "what if" game. If you're prepared financially for the consequences of only carrying minimum liability insurance then by all means enjoy the dip in your auto insurance rates. If you're not, however, it might be better to pay a little extra each month to make sure you're never left standing at the side of the road after an accident with no options in sight.