We have been covering our recommendations for your car insurance policy through recent blogs including what liability coverage you should have and how to navigate the personal injury protection, comprehensive, and collision coverages of your policy. To round out our series and help you feel confident your policy is set up to give you the coverage you need to truly protect yourself, let’s dive into one of the most important parts of your policy: the Supplemental Uninsured / Underinsured part.
Mandatory vs. recommended coverages
Similar to how there are mandatory minimum coverages on many other parts of your policy, there is a minimum of $25,000 for the Supplemental Uninsured / Underinsured motorist coverage. This means that if someone were to hurt you in an accident and they did not have coverage, your insurance policy would cover you up to $25,000 for your injuries. Obviously, you want to protect yourself and your family as much as you are protecting other people. The best way to do so is to match this coverage to your liability coverage and then this coverage steps into the shoes of an uninsured person who causes an accident that causes injuries to you or someone who is uninsured has a small policy that is not sufficient enough to cover you for the extent of your injuries.
A good example of when this could benefit you the most is if you are injured in a car accident and the person that caused the accident only had a $25,000 liability policy and you had $500,000 of Supplemental Uninsured / Underinsured coverage. Let’s say you broke some bones or needed surgery as a result of the accident. The other person’s insurance company could pay you $25,000 and you can then put in an Uninsured/Underinsured claim against your own policy for up to $500,000. What gets deducted from your $500,000 coverage is whatever you got from the other driver, which means you’d have $475,000 of remaining coverage.
This coverage is like a shadow and provides this protection to everyone living in your house (resident relatives) no matter where they are when they are injured.This coverage is there for you even if you are injured while walking your dog, riding your bicycle, or are a passenger in a friend’s car!
What to do next
There is no worse feeling than getting into a bad car accident only to discover once you call your insurance company that you did not have the coverage you needed to protect yourself. The best way to make sure this doesn’t happen to you, is to review your car insurance policy and make the necessary changes so you gain peace of mind that you have the right coverage should you need it.
Mark T. Freeley wants to make sure that you have all the coverage you need and is happy to offer completely free reviews of your car insurance policy. To take advantage of this free help, all you have to do is email a copy of your policy to northshoreinjurylawyer@gmail.com or text a picture of it to Mark at 631-495-9435 and he is happy to go over it with you on the phone and make recommendations so you know if and when something happens you’ll be in the right position and have the right coverage.
