Insurance:
By this stage, you've booked the car of your choice, have arranged financing the car and are walking in to the dealership tomorrow to get the car home. What follows is a 2-phase approach.
Phase 1- Purchasing your first auto insurance
Now you must purchase a new car insurance policy as a legal prerequisite before you are allowed to drive the car back. This is an important financial implication, and you would do well to spend quality time going through this process thoroughly.
You will end up having to choose online between the typical large US insurance players - listed below, primarily because this is your first time purchasing an auto insurance policy:
1. GEICO
2. Progressive
3. State Farm
4. Esurance
5. Allstate
You must be aware of
3 queries that you will be asked during your online application, that play a large role in determining your eventual quote:
a. Have you ever had auto insurance before?
A "Yes" to this query plays a large role in driving down your new quote. However, being your first time, you will answer "No" and therefore automatically setup a high premium to begin with.
b. Your license details
Remember I mentioned earlier about the importance of having your local license before getting to this stage? Providing your local license details serves as some measure of counterbalance in reducing your insurance quote. And the
longer you have had your local license by this stage, the more productive it is towards reducing your quote.
However, if you do not have your local license yet by this stage, you can still proceed to supply your Indian license details to complete your insurance purchase. But bear in mind that this will serve to increase your insurance quote.
Note that using your local Learners Permit for this stage is not advised, primarily due to the steep premiums that go with it.
c. Intended usage of your car: leisure/work ?
A third query that directly determines your insurance quote. I understand that if your usage is Leisure rather than for Work, that lowers the eventual quote by an extent.
My fellow-moderator
aah78 (thanks again, Advait!), summarizes the list of all parameters that determine your insurance quote: location, traffic density, age, driving history, parking situation, (approx.) yearly miles to be driven.
Phase 2- After you have purchased your first auto insurance policy
You have your auto insurance by now, albeit at a high premium. You now begin to think about rationalizing that premium to more acceptable levels. After a soak-in period of atleast a month, you can look at other insurance options :
1. Compare new quotes online yourself. Your current insurer might themselves have a more competitive quote
2. Consider regional/smaller insurers. This is known to be an effective method to lower your new quotes.
3. Adapt to
Usage-based insurance (UBI) telematics to build up a driving history with your current insurer to reduce premiums from them eventually.
You now are in the phase of settling down with your car comfortably.
Registration plates
As the final activity in your first US car ownership journey is your car registration/license plates. This is another major difference between US/India car ownership. The registration plates on your car
change with every change in ownership, and is not fixed like in India.
Most dealers arrange your new plates with the DMV directly, and these are couriered home by your dealer for you to fit onto your car directly. While your permanent license plates arrive, the dealer would provide temporary dealer registration plates to enable you to start using the car.
In some cases, if there are any delays from the DMV in processing your permanent registration plates, they will enable you with temporary registration - mostly in the form of a paper plate (not kidding).
You are now all set. You will have to drive to the DMV yearly to renew your registration- an important activity and another difference between US/India procedures.