Liability Insurance is the piece of that auto policy that protects you. It will take care of any sort of claims or payments that you are legally responsible for to somebody else for either bodily injury or property damage. The reality is, nobody wants to have an auto accident, it’s called exactly that “an accident”. No prudent person wants to either have one, or even plans ever to have one but they just happen. It’s a very distracted world, you know, and there are lots of things going on.
There are two different types of policies that you can get, as far as the liability limits are concerned. One of them is a CSL or a combined single limits, which is not very common, or the more common that you probably have is a split limits.
Split Limits Explained
The split limits are typically listed out as some sort of limits like either 100,000, 300,000 slash 100,000. Sometimes, maybe it’s even higher than that, such as 250,000, 500,000, and then 100,000. Now, what those numbers represent are the different limits of coverage that you have. Let’s just break that down a little bit. The first number 100,000, which is the liability limit for bodily injury per person. The second number is bodily injury per accident, which would be for all the different people concerned in that one accident. The third number is for property damage and that is a per-accident limit.
Let’s say that you have 100, 300, 100. That is going to be 100,000 bodily injuries per person. 300,000 bodily injuries per accident. Then 100,000 property damage per accident.
What About The Combined Single Limits?
Regarding the CSL or the combined single limits that I mentioned before, those aren’t very common. Those policies basically are really similar to the split limit, but you just have one limit for all of the claims, regardless if it’s bodily injury or property damage. So just understand that difference, but you don’t typically see those very often and understand that these limits represent the maximum that your policy is going to pay.
So basically, if you have a 100, 300, 100, the most that policy is going to pay is 100,000 for bodily injury from a single accident. You also need to understand that the limit is going to be the cap that they’re going to pay. So if you have a claim that exceeds whatever your limit is, you are going to become personally responsible for whatever that balance is. So let’s say that maybe you have lower liability limits, let’s say 25, 50, 25, and you have an accident, where 25,000 is all the property damage you have and you hit somebody, you damage someone’s brand new vehicle. It’s hard to find a vehicle that’s going to be under, you know, $25,000 that’s brand new, you will become personally responsible for whatever was over that $25,000.
Few Key Takeaways
One is that your personal auto policy is there for your protection, it is to take care of your legal responsibility for bodily injury and for property damage. Those limits are the maximum it’s going to pay, you would become personally responsible for any sort of claims or payments beyond that. The last thing that I want you to take away from this is that if you need to save money on your insurance, this is not the best place to do it. The liability limits from one limit to another typically are not very large. Usually, you can do better if you decide to take higher deductibles on your comprehensive and collision or maybe offer some coverages somewhere else.
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Beaux Pilgrim, CEO
Beaux Pilgrim
Reed Insurance