Have you ever heard someone tell you to slow down? That you're letting life pass you by? That by constantly hurrying to get from one place to another you're actually depriving yourself of the chance to see everything that life has to offer? Did you know that by choosing not to listen you're actually setting yourself up to take some hard hits when it comes to your auto insurance?
Think about it. When you're on the road, what's the number one thing you worry about the coppers pulling you over for? Right. Driving too fast. Giving in to that ol' lead foot that tells you that spending your entire life tooling down the interstate is boring and you should really hurry up and get where you're going.
Unfortunately, your local police department probably isn't going to be very sympathetic to the fact that you're bored and would really like to be done with that whole "spending too much time on the road" thing. Anything faster than five to ten miles per hour over the speed limit is probably going to earn you a ticket (depending on where you happen to be-there are some parts of the country where the police will issue a ticket for driving two to three miles over the speed limit just because they can). Statistics show that there are over 41,000,000 speeding tickets issued annually in the United States.
Do you know what those tickets are doing to your auto insurance premiums? Most people don't, which is why speeding tickets are generating an extra twelve billion dollars a year for the insurance industry.
The average speeding ticket raises the cost of your auto insurance by $900 or more over the course of three years-not counting the elimination of any Good Driver discounts you may have been enjoying from your previously clean driving record if this is your first ticket in the past five years or so. So if you're paying, say, $200 a month in auto insurance and your insurance company had given you a 15% Good Driver discount when you bought your policy your insurance costs could jump by $55 or more a month.
Over the course of three years, that single speeding ticket could cost you $1980 in excess auto insurance costs. Is there any place you really have to go that's worth paying almost two thousand dollars to get there five minutes early?
On the other hand, slowing down, maintaining the speed limit and learning to keep a weather eye out for where the police in your area like to lurk (hey, you're bound to be late for work sooner or later-knowing where they're lying in wait could prove to be an invaluable piece of knowledge!) could save you hundreds or even thousands on your auto insurance. So really, what's your hurry? Kick back and enjoy the scenery. You only live once. Do you really want to spend it watching the roses fly by in a red, fuzzy blur?
