One of the things that I have certainly always known, that has been reinforced through my experience in law, is that the one thing you cannot afford to be without is car insurance. Those who don’t have car insurance and are involved in an accident, and that is if they are lucky and there is another party as opposed to a theft where you don’t even know who has your vehicle, is that it is a painful and expensive process that seldom reaps any return.

Too often people skim on insurance and say that they will cut that particular expense, so as to make their ends meet and if I had to take a hard line approach, I would say if you cannot afford insurance, you cannot afford a car. The reality is, one simple mistake that you make might leave you in a position where you owe literally hundreds of thousands to somebody else and are financially ruined. Even if you take the robust approach that you will never be to blame for an accident, you may very well be unfortunate enough to have an accident with somebody else, who like you, is not insured and if they have no assets, you are never going to recover any of the money that you spend on fixing or replacing the car.

We have one of the highest accident rates in the entire world, and there are very few adults who will go through life without having at least one accident. You should make sure that when it happens, you have an insurance company to call. Incidentally, because of a combination of factors including the fact that people who cannot afford insurance invariably cannot afford legal fees as well as the fact that you often spend thousands of rands and then discover that the other party has no money to pay the case you have just won. This is the type of legal case my firm does not even take on in the first place.