I don't know what the name for it is, but I think that it's possible to get Driver's Insurance or somesuch, which is supposed to cover you no matter what vehicle you're in (For people who rent often or drive professionally) It may be the sort of thing that's more business targeted, though, and priced accordingly.

Yeah, my friend Jill got this because she was required to have some kind of car insurance for her personal injury insurance. I could ask her about it if your agent doesn't know, but she's in the UK right now (her insurance was in the US) so it would take a while.

That is totally messed up, and the insurance industry is surely corrupt.

But, Happy Birthday, anyway!

Actually thats not true and whoever you spoke to is misinformed. I carried driver's insurance for years when I didn't own a car. Its called different things by different carries - some call it driver's insurance, others call in non-owners insurance, etc. What you should do is call someone that can tell you exactly what the lack of coverage penalty would be and weight that against the cost of the non-owners insurance.

When I got my first car, I was living in Pennsylvania, they made it sound like you had to have insurance to get insurance. They made a big deal of me sending them a copy of my parents policy (which I was still on), even though it was the same company.

I suggest writing the state insurance commissioner. Or find the VIN for some junky thing worth $100 and pay for the absolute minimum policy you can. If you have home owners/renters insurance, call them and see if there is anything they can do; you might pose it as 'sometimes I drive friends cars but I want my own insurance to protect myself'.

If you don't previously have car insurance, they're going to assess you a different rate. Same thing for health insurance. New policies are a higher risk than transferring an existing policy.

Sounds like the problem is with the actuarial field?

'sometimes I drive friends cars but I want my own insurance to protect myself'

This exists. The agent just didn't know that the fuck they were talking about.

The insurance industry exists to make a profit, and will sieze upon any excuse, no matter how slim, to grub as much money as they possibly can out of their customers.

Shorter answer: Yes, it's totally messed up.

the insurance industry is a huge rip off. I pay money every month in case i'm in an accident. And if I have an accident? they raise my rates.

go figure...

Hope you're having a happy birthday!!

This is actually pretty unique to PA, I have not run into it in other states. When I first moved here I was told it is because the state of pa considers drivers without continueing coverage to be high risk.

And yes the insurance industry is corrupt.

dougie

Odd. After recently scrapping my car I called Geico to cancel my policy, and she warned me about this issue, suggesting that I drop to bare minimum coverage instead of canceling my policy. So that's what I did. I don't know the details, but I assume it's basically the 'driver's insurance' others have mentioned.

Yah, see, my problem isn't that I want to not spend the money, it's that I don't want to have any responsibility attached to that car in case something happens. We couldn't figure out a way to get me insurance without having it be on that car.

Yeah I get that. I was just saying that my insurance company not only didn't have a problem with doing that, but pointed out to me that I might want to.

Gwen -

Would you like me to make some phone calls and see what we can do for you? Nationwide has a lot of options and hopefully we can find one that minimizes the penalty.

Or at least maybe I can find a better explanation of what's going on....

Let me know

I have actually solved this situation by getting on my mom's policy for the interim. But thanks!