When your teen turns sixteen and you’re hit with the reality of a teen car insurance rate, it’s like a monster that popped out of that birthday cake. As with all life experiences that affect your car insurance premium, it’s time for you to sit down and try to figure out what you can do to save money. You look at your budget and cross off the unnecessary things, but as you try to fit that thousand dollar a year new expense into it, you think it might be better just to buy your kid a bicycle and let the car go back to its natural habitat. That’s up to you, but remember that your teenagers first couple of years of good driver experience will help her get a good teen car insurance rate once she’s out of the house, so the earlier you can start, the better.

The truth is that you don’t have to start eating boiled rice every night and one raw egg for breakfast every morning, move into a tent under the overpass, and wear a hat to keep out the rain. Even teenagers can get a teen car insurance rate with little effort that doesn’t break the bank.

Instead of trying to cut out everything but water, roots, and berries from your budget, start thinking of all the ways that you can save money on your teen car insurance rate. That birthday doesn’t look so scary anymore. Let’s look at the options available to you.

• Discounts

Lots of companies have discounts that are available to lower your teen car insurance rate. If your teen only drives a couple of miles to school every day, then it’s possible she is eligible for the low mileage discount. If she makes good grades, there’s a discount for that, and if you enroll her in a driver’s ed course, there’s on for that as well.

• Deductible.

Raise the deductible for the entire policy to lower your monthly premium. If you do this in addition to taking other measures that will keep your teen from getting into a car insurance accident, then you can lower your teen car insurance rate pretty substantially.

• Coverage.

Think about it. Do you really need a thousand different kinds of coverage? You might want to keep full coverage on your teen’s car, just in case, but if your own car is worth less than a thousand dollars, then there’s really no point. Cut your coverage down to the minimum liability required in your state, because that’s where most of your teen car insurance rate is coming from.