Is Oregon’s minimum auto insurance enough?

One ordinary crash, run through the minimum

You merge badly on Beltline and hit a two-year-old SUV carrying two people. Neither injury is catastrophic — an ambulance ride, an emergency room visit, imaging, and a few weeks of physical therapy each.

The vehicle is a total loss at $34,000. Your property damage limit is $20,000. The remaining $14,000 is yours.

The two people run $30,000 and $18,000 in medical bills. Your per-person cap is $25,000, so the first is short by $5,000. Your per-crash cap is $50,000, which covers the rest. You owe another $5,000.

That is a routine crash, not a catastrophe, and it leaves roughly $19,000 that the injured parties are entitled to collect from you — through your wages and your assets if it comes to that.

What raising the limits costs

Moving from 25/50 to 100/300 typically costs far less than people expect, because the expensive part of an auto policy is the first dollar of coverage, not the last. The claims that exhaust a $25,000 limit are common; the ones that exhaust $300,000 are rare, so carriers price the extra cheaply.

We generally recommend 250/500 with matching uninsured motorist limits for anyone with a house, savings, or future wages worth protecting.

The umbrella question

Once your auto and home liability are at solid limits, a personal umbrella adds a further million or more across both, usually for a couple hundred dollars a year. It is the cheapest liability coverage sold, and it only makes sense after the underlying limits are raised.