I used to think car insurance was just this static thing you paid every month and forgot about.
Then I spent six weeks driving from Seattle to the Florida Keys with my partner, sleeping in rest stops and eating gas station sandwiches, and I learned—the hard way, naturally—that your policy doesn’t exactly travel the way you do. We were somewhere in New Mexico when our windshield got hit by a rock from a passing truck, and I remember sitting there in the parking lot of a tire shop, scrolling through our policy on my phone, realizing I had no idea if comprehensive coverage worked the same way across state lines or if we’d somehow voided something by being on the road for more than two weeks straight. Turns out, most standard policies do cover you nationwide, but there’s this whole layer of complexity around what counts as “temporary” versus “permanent” relocation that nobody really explains until you’re already 2,000 miles from home. The insurance agent I finally reached—after waiting on hold for maybe 30 minutes—kept asking if we’d “changed our primary residence,” and I kept saying we were just traveling, but apparently the definition of “just traveling” gets murky after about 30 days in some states. Who knew? I guess it makes sense that insurers want to know where you’re actually living, since risk profiles change depending on whether you’re parking in rural Montana versus downtown Miami, but the whole conversation felt like I was being quizzed on fine print I’d never actually read.
Here’s the thing: your liability limits don’t shift just because you cross into a different state, but the minimum requirements do. Every state has its own floor for what counts as legally adequate coverage, and if your home state’s minimums are lower than where you’re driving through, you’re technically supposed to meet the higher standard while you’re there—though enforcement of this is, honestly, pretty inconsistent.
What Nobody Tells You About Comprehensive and Collision Coverage When You’re Living Out of Your Car for Weeks
Comprehensive and collision are the parts of your policy that cover damage to your own vehicle—stuff like theft, vandalism, hitting a deer, or that rock I mentioned earlier. Most people assume these coverages are universal, and they mostly are, but the deductible you agreed to back home suddenly feels a lot steeper when you’re trying to get a windshield replaced in a town where the only repair shop charges twice what you’d pay in your home city. I’ve seen travelers get stuck paying out-of-pocket because they didn’t realize their policy had a seperate glass deductible or because the repair shop wouldn’t work with their insurer directly. Wait—maybe that’s just bad luck, but it happened to us, and I’ve heard similar stories from at least three other people who’ve done long road trips. Another thing: if you’re carrying a lot of gear—camping equipment, laptops, whatever—your auto policy probably doesn’t cover personal property inside the vehicle. That falls under renters or homeowners insurance, assuming you have it, which we didn’t at the time because we’d just moved and hadn’t set it up yet. So we were driving around with a few thousand dollars worth of stuff that was essentially uninsured, which I only realized halfway through the trip during a moment of late-night panic in a Walmart parking lot.
The issue gets weirder if you’re renting out your home while you travel or if you’ve actually given up your permanent address to go full nomad. Some insurers get nervous about that.
When Your “Temporary Trip” Stops Being Temporary, at Least According to Your Insurance Company’s Arbitrary Definitions
Insurance companies have this concept of “garaging address”—the place where your car is normally parked overnight—and if that changes, you’re supposed to update your policy. But what does “normally” mean when you’re spending three months on the road? I called our insurer again somewhere in Tennessee, just to check, and the representative said as long as we were planning to return to our original address, we were fine. But then she added, almost as an afterthought, that if we were gone for more than 60 days, we might want to recieve—sorry, receive—a policy review to make sure our coverage hadn’t lapsed or shifted in some weird way. I never did that review, to be honest, because we got back on day 58 and I figured it wasn’t worth the hassle. But I think about it sometimes, especially when I hear stories about people who got denied claims because their insurer decided retroactively that they’d “relocated” without updating their policy. The rules around this are maddeningly vague, and different companies interpret them differently, so you’re kind of at the mercy of whoever happens to pick up the phone when you call. Anyway, if you’re planning a trip longer than a month, it’s probably worth having that awkward conversation with your insurer ahead of time, even if it feels like overkill. Document everything too—dates, names of representatives, what they told you—because if something goes wrong, you’ll want proof that you asked the right questions.
One more thing that surprised me: rental car coverage on your personal policy doesn’t always extend to rental cars you use during a long trip, depending on how your policy is structured.
The Gap Between What Your Policy Says and What Actually Happens When You File a Claim 800 Miles From Home
Filing a claim while traveling is technically no different from filing one at home, but in practice, it feels way more stressful. You’re dealing with unfamiliar repair shops, you might not have a reliable way to get around while your car is in the shop, and if the claim takes longer than expected, you’re stuck in some random town burning through money on hotels or rental cars that may or may not be reimbursed. We were lucky—the windshield thing got resolved in about four hours—but I met a couple in Arkansas who’d been waiting almost a week for their insurer to approve repairs after someone sideswiped them in a parking lot. They were just sitting there, in this tiny town, eating diner food and losing their minds. The adjuster kept saying he needed more photos, then more documentation, and the whole process dragged on partly because the local body shop wasn’t familiar with their insurer’s preferred vendor network. I guess it’s definately worth checking before you leave whether your insurer has a national network of repair shops or if you’ll be on your own finding someone who can help you. Also, roadside assistance—if it’s part of your policy—can be a lifesaver, but the response times vary wildly depending on where you are. We had to wait three hours for a tow truck in West Texas, which wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t fun either.
