So I just recently got a car (wooh) and since I am a student under the age of 25, I’m eligible to get a good student discount from my insurance company.
But wait!
Taking a careful look at the eligibility requirements, I notice the first line says: “All male and unmarried female drivers blah blah…” Well that’s kind of weird.
Then I turn it over. This side is the form for the extended good student discount. And right in the middle of the page it says, “The Good Student Discount terminates at age 25 or if female, at the time of marriage, whichever occurs first.”
Just a WAG, but maybe young males are a worse driving risk, and the company assumes that if you’re married, your husband will also be driving the car regularly?
Mr. Kiminy and I got married on his 25th birthday. Since men suddenly stop having accidents when they either turn 25 or get married, our insurance premiums dropped considerably the next time they came due.
Most of these figures are based on hard statistics, rather than just WAGs.
Actuaries (the people that compute insurance risk statistics) do not care a damn about political correctness or even understanding in depth why such things occur. They just run the numbers and things just are according to the numbers. It doesn’t mean that someone cannot be a great 16 year old male driver with a criminal record and massive hearing loss. They have to assign people into groups within the bounds of discrimination law and that is the way it is.
All that means is they found a correlation there and although they know it doesn’t apply to every individual, it works for the group. Their job is to maximize revenue to the company by weighing statistical risks versus payouts and that is what they do.
Perhaps it is more about the fact that they assume that if you are female your husband will now be taking on the burden of your student loans and college fees, and so you shouldn’t be entitled to a student discount. The converse would apply, they expect male married students not to rely on their wife to financially support them, and so they would still be entitled to a discount.
Just a WAG.
I discovered last year, that as I would be getting married during term time, my student loan would be allocated based on my father’s salary, rather than my husband’s. Obviously, I’d get more money if they based it on my husband’s salary, but apparently only if we’d gotten married 6 weeks earlier!
Maybe your getting a discount because your married.
So you either get a marriage discount or a good student discount. They don’t want to give you both.
Perhaps married women and men over the age of 25 already pay lower rates than unmarried women and men under 25 (I know that’s the case for under 25 men.) So they don’t want to give you a discount on top of their already lowered rate, as it were. Or what hampshire said.