My car insurance costs $11,000 a year!
Unfortunately, my youngest kid (26) took out his pain at his father's death by collecting a batch of speeding tickets.
Short of kicking this underemployed service worker out of the house, does anyone have any idea how to lower this bill?
(I have one nice car and one beater)
= new reply since forum marked as read
Here are the hilights:
1. When the kid graduated from high school we told him that, if he chose to go after additional education (i.e. college, vo-tech) he could continue to live with us free of charge. However, if he chose to get a job he would be expected to pay some rent ($200 a month for room and board is not unreasonable but he thought we were gouging him even after we showed him on paper what actual monthly costs were for the house).
2. He decided to move to NH to live with his half sister where he, an 18 year old became friends with a couple of 14/15 year old kids (who had been through the legal system by the way). The kids tell him we ought to go on vacation - to Florida. Keith's reaction - OK. This is called interference with custody of minors.
3. Authorities tracked their travels via Keith's debit card transactions. They ran out of money in Florida where the Pizza Hut called the police because they could not make good on their check. Police realize there is an APB out on Keith and, of course the street wise kids turn on him so fast you head would spin.
4. Keith gets a ride on Con Air (the cost of which by the way the Feds will tack onto what you have to pay back at some time). Truck is still in Florida. Dad has to pay a company to bring the truck to Oklahoma.
5. Dad hires a lawyer for Son, manages to get him out of bail and talks Grandmother into taking him in until the charges are resolved. He was only asked to do 2 things: 1. get a job and 2. stay out of trouble.
6. Grandmother worked for the State of NH and when Keith started to get letters from the NH DMV she called someone she knew to find out what was going on. He had been pulled over by the police twice, once for speeding and once for playing his car stereo at an excessive volume. So much for staying out of trouble.
7. Of course he met a girl (who had been kicked out of her Dad's house) and basicly tried to move her into Grandma's house. The girl was a bum who did not work, go to school or even try to help out around the house. Grandma essentially kicked her out.
8. Grandma was on Keith's checking account and notice that he was paying a lot of mony on hotel rooms for him and the girl. Now mind you, he is supposed to be saving money to help with this lawyer's fees. I told Grandma to immediately get her name off of the checking account because she is liable for whatever he does with it.
9. Finally gets to court where he is sentenced to to a couple of years of which the time he was locked up pending bail would count and with good behaviour he could get out in a few months.
10. Girlfriend decides to go back to NY to live with her Mom. Keith thinks that, once he is out of prison, he will go to live with this girl at her Mom's house in NY. So of course, he lets her take his belongings, including his car to NY. 
11. As you can predict, it did not take long for the girl to write him a dear john letter. Keith was allowed to go on work detail out fo the prison and attempted to commit suicide with aspirin.
12. Dad managed to get the attorney to get his son to sign a Power of Attorney so that Dad could take the bus to NY to pick up son's belongings. After Dad leaves to head to NY, girl calls and tells me that Dad cannot come to NY. Now I know something is up. I manage to leave a message at one of the Greyhound stops for hime to call me. It turns out, when Keith let the girl take his car and belongings to NY she did not have a driver's license and she got into an accident, wrecking a tire. The car had been in the impoundment lot for about 4 months or more (you can imagine how much it cost to get the car out).
13. Kid gets out of prison and imagine that no one in the family is willing to take him in but his Dad (who works in the oil field and is never home to deal with his own kid). Kid told to get a job because he still has bills to pay (remember he has to pay for his ride on Con Air for example).
14. Kid comes home (on probation) and it does not take him long to talk his Dad into letting him trade in his vehicle and have Dad co-sign on a FIVE YEAR car loan on a used car. I had to leave the house for a while, I was so mad. There was not doubt in my mind that Keith would never meet his obligations on this loan and that his Dad would get stuck with it. I point blank told the Dad that he was stupid.
15. Of course he meets another girl who he basicaly moves into the house. As before, she is a bum wiht no job. When they left the house but left her purse behind I did search it where I found legal papers indicating that she was facing legal charges for drugs.
16. As Thanksgiving comes, my sister tells me that my mother is declining fast and if I want to see her again that I need to make a trip home. I went over Thanksgiving weekend. I returned to no long distance phone. I calle the phone company and found out that the kid had run the long distance phone bill by about $400 on 1-900 long distance sex phone calls. I had to pay the bill to be able to get ahold of his Dad to tell him what had happened. I also found out at that time that the girl he had met had a little girl of about 1.5 years old (neighbors informed me). I am like who the heck has been taking care of this child while her mother was living in my house? I called Child Protective Services and tole them what was going on and to please check on the child to make sure that someone was taking care of her properly.
16. Mom dies in January and I have to go home for the funeral. I tell his Dad that I do not want to come back to any problems with his son. I am beyond fed up at this point. Before I return home, I find out that the kid had attempted suicide again and is in the Psych ward at a local hospital and I would need to pick him up when I get back because of course his Dad is not around. If I could back and change things, I would have left him there becasue that was where he needed to be.
17. Kid starts to get a lot of mail from the bank which he throws in the trash can. I pull them out of the trash can and find out that he has been on quite a spree writing bad checks. I call the bank and ask someone to have a chat with him to let him know the consequences that will be heading his way if he doesn't clean up his act (more criminal charges and jail time).
18. He got mad when I grabbd his tax refund check. He got a lecture from me that he needed to take that money and make good on the bad checks he had written. I can tell you that he would have taken the money and blown it. In addition, he had let his car insurance lapse which would have left his Dad legally liable for everything if his son had gotten into any accidents.
19. And yes, I had enough of this circus and left.. The girl broke up with him when he started pressuring her to get pregnant (are you serious!). It was probably one of the few times when the girl made a good decision.
20. From what I heard, he invited her over to the house and killed himself in front of her. She is lucky he didn't kill her first. I know for a fact that there were no bullets in the house when I moved out because I had gotten rid of them quite a while back. And I still got stuck with having to track his Dad done at his work site to tell him the news.
21. What happened to this kid was totally predictable. I had been telling his Dad what was going on all along the way and he didn't listen and remained in total denial of how bad the situation was. Only one of two outcomes was inevitable - more prison time or an early death.
Do I regret that Keith killed himself? No. I was fed up both Keith and his Dad. The Dad perpetually enabled his son's behaviour and left me stuck dealing with a kid in a situation where nothing was going to change. It might have been painful in the short run but it was probably kinder to the family in the long run. I more then served my time with his son and I left and moved on with my life.
This was almost 10 years ago. I spent $1700 and bought my mom's old car and gave it to him and told him he had to pay his own insurance. I was able to take him off of our policy since he had his own car, and our bill went back to something affordable. He didn't need full coverage on mom's old beater since he owned it outright, so the insurance was easier for him to afford as well. I don't know how things are in your state though, so you should talk to an agent. My son didn't have all those tickets, he was just a high school student. Once he had his own car and insurance, we did not have to list him as a part time driver on our vehicles. Good luck to you!
since I've never been a parent, other than being a kitty mom, but I am dumbfounded at the $11,000. With all the tickets, fees, surcharges, cost of car, maintenance, gas, and insurance, it would seem that it would be worth it to learn how to get around without driving. A combination of public transportation, getting rides from friends and family, and maybe Uber or some other less expensive means might be the answer for now.
I wouldn't and couldn't absorb the $11k hit to my after-tax income.
Cher
