Is Your Car Insurance Transferable to Other Countries?

by Lisa Tarticchio

More Insurance Articles

Published on this site: August 19th, 2009 - See more articles from this month

Car insurance is a wonderful thing. Not only is it getting cheaper over the course of time, but it also can allow you to get into an accident and still have the money leftover in order to get different things to happen. Car insurance might not be transferable to other countries however, primarily because of the fact that the governments in the two areas do not match. If it was up to the company, then any multinational corporation would be able to offer you transferable car insurance, but because that is not the world we live in, there are many concerns that you need to take into account when figuring out if your car insurance might be transferable.

• Get Clarification:
  
  The first thing that you will want to do is go straight to the horse's mouth and get clarification from the company if the car insurance that you currently have can be transferred to other companies. Either you ask the representative directly, giving them the name of the new country, or you go right to their website in an attempt to figure that information out for yourself. Either way, there is no answer more reliable than one from the company and that is definitely where you want to go first.
  
  One problem that you might run into however is the company not working in ther countries and therefore having no idea whatsoever if their insurance is transferable. This is rare, but it does tend to happen sometimes when you are working with smaller firms that do not work on the national level. Because many people still do work with these types of firms, here is what you can do if the company is unable to offer clarification.
  
  
• Compare Road Laws:
  
  Road laws within different countries are quite different and one way for you to figure out if your insurance is transferable to a specific country would be to compare the road laws of that country to the road laws of your current area of residence. This is because certain insurance plans are built upon certain road laws and if those road laws do not exist in the new country, then there is a very good chance that the plan you have right now is not going to be transferable.
  
  Additionally, you will also want to consider the insurance laws in the new country that you are visiting. These laws will tell you right away whether they recognize insurance companies from other countries and there will usually be a list of the recognized companies as well. You can always call the consulate working in your country and get the information from them as well. There are many places that you can go to get road and insurance law information on a specific country, so figuring out if your insurance is good in that country even without the help of your provider is not something that should be that difficult to do.
  
  
• Changing for Compatibility:
  
  If you find out that your current insurance plan is not transferable to the new country, then chances are that you are going to have to chance your insurance provider to one that directly operates in the new country. At the same time however, if you are really attached to your provider and do not want to change, then there might be a way for you to make your current plan compatible with the laws that the new country has. The only way to find out if this is possible is from the actual country's representatives, since they are the ones that have control of that issue.

Lisa Tarticchio: Find out more about insurance plans today. We are the premiere Canadian online source for car and home insurance. Visit us to get a free insurance quote at: http://www.belairdirect.com.