Teenagers are bad drivers

Ok, I do NOT really mean that unilaterally. There are good teen drivers. But what I mean to suggest is that their lack of driving experience often causes trouble on the road.

I own an insurance agency in the Phoenix metro area. A client asked if I would teach her 16 year old son to drive.

Knowing there is no father figure in the home, I readily agreed. It would give me an opportunity to get to know this young boy as well and give him some time with a male figure, something I understood was lacking in his life.

As Chris (as I will call him) and I settled into the car I asked Chris if he yet driven. The answer was “Yes”. He and Mom had driven a couple times but she got too nervous to continue.

Chris rounded the first corner and nearly hit a parked car. He did smack the curb around the next corner and almost took out two rather large trash barrels as we moved along the residential street. It was painfully obvious that Chris did not realize he controlled the steering wheel and not the other way around. Another car approached from the opposite direction and it took me pulling the steering wheel to avoid a head on collision. When Chris turned a corner he either pulled too tightly or made a wide loop. Both made me extremely nervous.

Patiently I tried to coax him into driving carefully, looking ahead, planning his approach to oncoming lights and turns. Chris got better. He improved week after week.
THEN I NOTICED A CHANGE.

As his confidence grew, so did his speed. That, I realized, is probably the primary mistake most teen drivers make. They confuse experience with quality.

Chris took off from every green light as if it were a race. He stopped in much the same jolting fashion. I felt like Dale Earnhardt was behind the wheel. My requests for “slow down” fell on deaf ears.
That is until we nearly were involved in a accident merging onto a freeway from an on-ramp.

My advice to Chris and all teen drivers is this: 1) do not drive faster than your experience or comfort level dictates, and 2) do not tail gate.

I wonder how many accidents would be avoided if we all followed those two simple suggestions.

By: Gary Brown

If you are an insurance broker or insurance agent you know full well that generating sales leads is the toughest part of your job. You cannot live without them because it is what drives your business. It would be great if clients called you for an auto insurance quote but it just doesn’t work that way unless you have an advertising budget for things such as yellow page ads.

If you’re like a lot of insurance brokers you buy internet auto insurance leads from online sources such as Insurance Finder or iLeads. This is quite a good system and a lot of insurance agents close a lot of sales via car insurance leads purchased from websites such as these. What normally happens with these internet leads is that the internet lead company draws on consumers that are searching for auto insurance quotes. They land on the website and fill out a form with the details of the type of insurance quote they are looking for. This is followed by the auto insurance sales lead website repackaging and reselling these leads to an insurance broker (sometimes the same lead is sold to multiple brokers). The broker then buys the lead, gives the client a quote and hopes to close the sale.

Not only are there websites that sell auto insurance leads but there are also those that sell all types of insurance lead including, home insurance leads, commercial insurance leads, liability insurance leads, life insurance leads, corporate group benefits leads, travel insurance leads, and disability insurance leads.

If you purchase insurance leads from websites that sell them, know that you are paying too much. Most lead generation websites draw visitors to their site buy paying for internet ads like Google Adwords. This is a system where these websites place ads in the sponsored area of search engines and pay every time someone clicks on the ad, usually between five cents and one dollar per click. The user then completes a form with his information and that information is then repackaged and resold to insurance agents like yourself, usually for between $5 and $100 per lead.

So, do you see how internet auto insurance leads cost too much? If you purchase leads you are paying a middle man, in this case the lead generation website, to gather information for you. You should know that you don’t need to pay a middle man to do this for you. All you need to do is set up your own website and buy these inexpensive “pay per click” ads. And, these days you can set up a professional looking website for under $100 and anybody can join the Google Adwords program to generate sales leads for themselves, including you!

By: Tino Buntic

Do you know how to use car insurance quote comparisons in Arizona to make sure you have enough coverage? Part of the process is to figure out how much car insurance coverage AZ drivers are required to have, and to evaluate whether this is enough for your needs. You will need to examine the quotes you are given and compare offerings from a number of insurers before you make a final decision.

Required Levels Of Coverage May Not Be Enough

Even though the Arizona State government has passed legislation directing that all drivers in that state must have a minimum level of coverage, this may not be sufficient to protect your assets. The reason that you buy insurance is to avoid having to pay damages to another person out of your own pocket following an accident.

If you don’t have enough coverage to pay for damages, you are legally obligated to pay the difference yourself. When you are comparing quotes for coverage, you need to make sure that what you are looking at matches your needs first and foremost.

According to guidelines from Consumer Reports, you should be looking at buying at least $100,000 in individual bodily injury coverage and $300,000 to pay for the medical expenses of two or more people injured in the same accident. Coverage for damage to property should be approximately $100,000.

Comparing Arizona Auto Insurance Quotes Online

If these numbers seem a bit high, consider how quickly medical expenses can add up if someone is seriously injured in an accident and needs surgery and/or a lengthy stay in hospital. You will be glad you took the time to give careful consideration to auto insurance quote comparisons in Arizona. You can start the process today by comparing AZ car insurance quotes online from at least 3 different companies.

By: James J. Robinson