Can you add a vehicle titled to your child to your auto insurance policy?
Your Child Buys a Vehicle in Their Name. Can You Add it to Your Auto Insurance Policy?
Today I want to talk about vehicles and your auto insurance.
We had a question recently posed to us from one of our customers they wanted to know if they could add their son’s vehicle to their car insurance policy, even though the vehicle was titled just in their son’s name.
Most insurance companies do not want to add the son’s vehicle to your policy in that case.
And there’s some reasons why the son may not want to have his vehicle added to your policy in that case.
One is if the vehicle is solely owned by your son and not owned by you and him jointly is if the policy is written in your name and there’s a claim, the check is going to be made payable to the first named insured, which is you, not your son.
Unfortunately you have no insurable interest in your son’s vehicle so therefore the company may not even want to pay the claim.
Now a lot of carriers will give additional discounts for the son’s vehicle while he is a resident of your home and goes with the same insurance company as you. This way, they can take advantage of some of the discounts such as:
- multi-vehicle in the household discount
- multi-policy discounts
This is a great option then for your son so he’s not really losing anything by being on his own policy but because the vehicle is solely owned by him he really should be on his own policy.
The other thing is if your auto insurance company allows you do add his vehicle to your policy, they will only do it for the time period that your son is a resident of your household.
Well let’s face it when your son decides that he’s moving in with his girlfriend or he got a job in another state or he’s moving out on his own.
You will celebrating and crying at the same time, but you’re not thinking about “oh my gosh we’ve got to do something with the insurance before you leave.”
So what could happen is, Junior moves out, a month later he totals his car and then he’s not an insured under the definition of insured under the policy, then you’d bein the situation where you may have a company denying a claim when you need them the most.
So the best thing is that your son get his own car insurance policy if the vehicle is titled solely to him.
You want to make sure also that your son has the same limits of liability that you have, just to make sure that there’s no conflict in the event that you drive your son’s car because his was the last one in the driveway or your car was broken down and you grab his.
We don’t want him to have state minimum insurance limits and you have very good substantial limits, and then have an accident and find out that you’re limited now to just the state minimum.
If it’s titled to both of you then sure we can add it to your policy without much of an issue..
Things are changing all the time in your life. So when things like this in the household arise, reach out to your insurance agent here at Huff Insurance we’d be happy to go over how the life changes are going to affect your insurance needs, and help give you the right advice for the situation.
