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Reasons Not to Add Your Boyfriend To Your Car Insurance

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There are many situations that are perfect for adding your boyfriend too. If you are going to the beach, it will be fun to bring your boyfriend with you. If you are moving, adding your boyfriend to the group of people helping you move can make things a whole lot faster. Adding your boyfriend to your car insurance, however, is not necessarily a good idea.

Car insurance companies look at a lot of different factors when they assign a rate to a customer’s auto insurance premiums. One of those factors is the gender of the customer. Women who have good driving histories will be charged lower premiums than men will, no matter what age either of them happen to be. While the fairness of this practice is open for debate, one thing remains true. Young women, who are in their twenties, are going to get a much better rate on their car insurance premiums than young men of the same age bracket will be offered.

The reasons why insurance companies offer different rates to men than they do to women has to do with their perception of risk. The website Edmunds.com reported that men are twice as likely to be intoxicated at the time that a fatal crash occurs than women are. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says that in 2009, 23,726 men were killed in motor vehicle accidents. This can be compared with the number of women who were killed in motor vehicle accidents that year, which was 10,070. Russ Rader, a spokesperson for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety noted that men are more likely to not wear their seatbelts than women are.

This is why an insurance company will charge men more than women for car insurance. The insurance company is trying to offset the cost of claims that would potentially be filed when a car accident occurs. One way for men to get around the higher rate is to add a girlfriend to their car insurance policy.

In order for this trick to work, the girlfriend has to have a good driving record. Often, the guy must be able to prove that his girlfriend lives with him, and that they are sharing the same vehicle (at least part of the time). This makes the twenty-something man be viewed as less risky for the insurance company to insure, and as a result it could make his car insurance premiums a bit lower.

Young women, on the other hand, do not have this advantage. Adding a boyfriend to your car insurance policy will generally cause your rates to increase. The insurance company will see your twenty-something boyfriend as a higher risk than it saw you as, and will adjust your rate accordingly. The same will happen if a woman adds a boyfriend who falls into an older age bracket to her car insurance.

Image by big-ashb on Flickr

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About Jen Thorpe

I have a B.S. in Education and am a former teacher and day care worker. I started working as a freelance writer in 2010 and have written for many topics here at Families.com.