Cheap car insurance and driving tips for the back to school rush

The summer is winding down; the nights are just starting to get a little longer and schools all over are beginning to open their doors. That means driving patterns are going to change. If your morning commute takes place between 7 am and 9 am you will find it slowed down a bit while the school buses work out their new routes. It probably is a good time to consider shifting you hours if possible or getting up a littler earlier. It can be an annoyance being stuck in traffic. It may even be a problem if you arrive late for work, but it can be very costly if you make poor driving decisions around a school bus.

In all states, it is mandatory to stop for a school bus. School busses in the United States are equipped with warning lights that flash yellow as they approach and red when they are stopped and picking up children. If the lights are red, motorists must stop no closer than 30 feet from the bus. Failure to do can be very very costly. For Example in Pennsylvania, a ticket for failing to stop for a school bus will cost the driver a 60-day suspension of his/her license, five points and a minimum of $250 fine. If this infraction put you over six points (first time over in 3 years), you are required to take a written exam within 30 days. If you fail the exam, your license is suspended.

While many insurance companies do not check for moving violations every year, the suspension of your license will greatly raise your car insurance rates . Please be advised, that while you may think you got away with passing the bus because no officer was on the scene, you are probably mistaken. Many states permit the bus driver to take down your license, write down the time, location, and a description of the driver, and request a summons be issued for you. Many bus drivers take offense at drivers trying to beat the bus by speeding up to pass just as the bus is coming to a stop. Doing this could cost you a court date and legal fees to prove otherwise.

Cheap car insurance isn't just about the policy you choose, it is also about the choices you make behind the wheel. To keep you cheap car insurance cheap, drive carefully.

Car rental companies and road trips with children

When you're young, you can go anywhere, anytime, and either just hang out or go hang-gliding or anything else ending in "ing" that involves putting your life on the line. You're free of responsibilities and, as you think about the world over a couple of beers as night draws in, it never really occurs to you that having children is a life-changing event. Only when confronted by the practical reality of two toddlers does it occur to you that hang-gliding with them suspended from your belt might not be a good idea.

So the burning question is where do you go and what do you do when you get there? Let's start with a fairly obvious problem to avoid. If you've been carefully training these little ones to sleep when it gets dark, going too far north into Alaska is a bad idea since the sun tends to stay in the sky more hours than you like. Stay in the southern regions where it goes dark at a sensible time. Now think about how much kit you need to keep the toddlers clean and fed during the driving. In addition to the seating to keep them safe, you need easy access to all the stored essentials without having to stop and dive into a crowded trunk every time you need something. Now think about breast-feeding. You need adequate room and it might be a good idea to have curtains at the windows in the back of the vehicle.

Do a strategic run-through in your own vehicle to get an idea of how much space you're going to need and then check on what makes and models will give you what you need with a miles-per-gallon rate that won't break the bank. Once you have the field narrowed down, it's on to the internet to find one of your preferred makes and models from car rental companies at a price you can afford. That's potentially going to need some negotiation with the car rental companies to get child-friendly seats of the right size fixed in place ready for you.

Cheap car insurance and those black boxes

Over a lifetime, there's probably a balance in the good and bad surrounding the children we produce. But there are certainly times when we bitterly regret taking the plunge, as it were. There are those times at school or when early experiments with cigarettes and alcohol go horribly wrong. There's all that attitude we get. But the worst comes when we're supposed to calmly shell out on driving lessons and then, to add insult to injury, to buy a cheap car for them to drive and to pay for the insurance. The fact finding cheap car insurance for teens is like winning the lottery seems not to occur to them as they assert the divine right to disappear from sight for hours on end, driving who knows where, while all we can do is sit in prayer the next call will not come from the police or hospitals telling us when we can come in to collect the broken bits of body.

Then, suddenly, we might be tempted by the arrival of telematics - not those fuzzy TV characters with rhubarb growing out of their heads, you understand. The Co-op, we can't go wrong with them, can we? have been running ads for their Young Driver Scheme. Instead of the usual "the sky's the limit" approach to insuring the young, they will fit black boxes that will watch our kids like a hawk. If their spy finds our children have suddenly converted into angels on four wheels, we will be rewarded with lower premiums. That sounds like such a good deal until we remember our children are more likely to be recorded hotdogging around the local park at 2 in the morning - a stunt that will ensure we never see a premium under four figures for the next however many years until they leave the nest and start paying their own way in life. So although there's that terrible lure of cheap car insurance for us to pay, we parents have to remember Big Brother watches and sees both good and bad. And the bad can be very expensive for us, if not for our young drivers of the year.