PSA #1: Low Mileage Discount for Car Insurance

A couple of public service announcements this evening--one was that fact that I recently updated my car insurance to reflect my driving habits--as mentioned previously, typically under 5000 miles per year, compared to the US average of 12,000 miles/year. For a graphic representation see below: the brown is my old Boston-to-495 commute (bleah!), black/yellow were my shiftless years in grad school, and blue is my current commute (2010 is YTD):


Partially, I was prompted by Dave and Katie's blog post ("Thoughts (and data!) on car ownership costs")--for those of you who don't overlap, they are lovely friends of Jofish's, who are currently living in Portland, OR car free, biking everywhere--woot! And that's with a 6-month old kid. Rock on, guys, I salute you. Anyway, they did the math on car ownership... if you add up everything, that government rate for mileage reimbursement (50 cents/mile), really is not a huge bargain. Also, they pointed out one of the unfortunate effects of owning a car:

To me, this drove home the point that if you're going to own a car anyway and you carpool driving can be cheaper than an annual transit pass costing around $1000 per year per person. This is one of the financial traps of car ownership: the incremental cost of any extra usage is small enough that if you own a car it's hard to financially justify not using it. It's a pair of thrifty handcuffs, making the owners feel good about driving more. I consider this throwing good money after bad.

Alas (speaking as a car owner). Perhaps my costs are lower... I'm not sure if my car has depreciated quite to zero, but it's getting close. But the least I could do was contact my insurance company, to see what their low mileage discount was. They told me that there were two tiers: at 7500 miles/year, and 5000 miles/year. It turns out that they verify low mileage based on the reported miles at your annual state inspection--pretty smaht, eh? Anyway, given my history, I'm pretty comfortable that I can hit 5000 regularly.


I got a revised bill, dropping my rates from $664/year to $572/year. Not terrific, but hey, getting $92/year for something that I already do ain't a bad thing. And for reference, those numbers are for a 18 year old car, garaged in Arlington, MA; 39 year old driver.