You need to have car insurance in order to drive your car – every state mandates a certain basic insurance coverage. If you don’t have the money to spend on additional coverage, then, even though most experts and car insurance groups would not recommend it, you can go with what is the minimum mandated coverage for your state. But if you have a nicer or newer car, and you don’t want to take a risk by having only the bare minimum, or even want full coverage for a younger or newer driver in the family, well, don’t despair!

Today, there are numerous players in the car insurance space, including the well-known and established car insurance groups like State Farm, Allstate, Liberty Mutual, to name a few. There are also players who have established themselves later on, and built a reputation for offering highly competitive rates, oftentimes the cheapest and most affordable option, like Geico and Progressive. There are also numerous smaller players that specialize in providing cheap car insurance, and you can find most of them online.

Researching online is really the best way to go when you want to compare and shop around between the various car insurance groups’ offerings. Not only can you head to individual car insurance group company sites and do an online check to see what kind of rates they offer for your bracket and driver demographic, you can also make use of the information on aggregator sites that have offer you side by side comparisons from many different players, so you can make sure you’re aware of what the cheap car insurance options available to you are. They even categorize them across different demographics like accident-free drivers, low income drivers, young drivers, seniors, and of course, neighborhood or zip code, and states. The last is needed given that some states have no-fault clauses (example, Florida) or a ton of regulations governing car insurance and insurers (Massachusetts), which makes it trickier and also costlier for the car insurance groups.

Opting for a higher deductible, bundling your car insurance with other insurance (homeowners insurance, for example), skipping collision for an old car, and perhaps most important, maintaining good credit by paying bills on time and not defaulting on loans are all good ways to help keep your car insurance costs down and get cheap car insurance for yourself.