Well, it’s that time of year again. We’ve got Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November and we’ve no sooner recovered from that when Christmas is upon us. And for those still alive, there’s a further opportunity to celebrate come New Year. Indeed, statistics show we drink more over the next few weeks than at any other time during during the year. Sure, there are cookouts when a few friends come around and drink some beer, but this is the season of good cheer and, often, excessive alcohol consumption. So welcome to the developing world of social host liability. Let’s suppose it’s obvious one of your party guests is seriously intoxicated, but you continue to supply more alcohol and fail to stop this person attempting to drive home. Once on the highway, this driver is involved in a traffic accident and seriously injures other people.

Under the law of negligence, you are liable if it’s foreseeable a drunk may drive and injure a third party. This area of liability started off under the Dram Shop Acts that made bartenders liable if drunken customers injured people on the way home. Courts have extended the liability from commercial sellers to social hosts who give the alcohol away. Either way, the driver is allowed to leave and presents a high risk to the general public. Let’s start off in New Jersey where a social host served a guest thirteen drinks in a hour and allowed him to drive away. Minutes later, he was involved in a head-on collision. The host was held liable. In 1986, the New Jersey lawmakers reduced the liability a little. If the blood-alcohol content is below .15, the host is exempted from liability. Continue Reading

It’s not often you see a headline on the foreign news section and actively worry about how it’s going to affect you. Yet, when you look at the spread of the democracy movement in North Africa and the Middle East, there’s real cause for concern. With the continuing fighting in Libya, oil supplies have been disrupted. Although the Saudis say they will always be able to make up the shortfall, there’s increasing doubt they can. Perhaps in years gone by, they really could turn a spigot and more crude would come out of the ground. Now, experts are saying we’re at “peak oil”, i.e. we’re producing the maximum amount possible and, from now on, we’re just going to have less. That’s why the price of gas at the pumps has been rising steadily over the last few weeks of February and shading into March. There are pessimists around saying we’ll be back up to $4 a gallon come the fall. The last time the price got that high, we all drove less and started to buy vehicles that would do more miles to the gallon. The same thing will probably happen this time around. But there’s another game just coming into town you might want to have a look at.

No matter what your view of the environmental movement and all this talk of climate change, there’s one fact no one can dispute. Right now, we still feel like we’re in a recession. Officially, unemployment is still around a national average of 9.5%. The real figure is probably around 16%. People are being put on short time and, in Wisconsin and other states where Republican Governors like Scott Walker and newly-elected lawmakers think they have a mandate from the voters to cut their deficits, layoffs are still to come. So everyone’s in the game of finding savings in their household budgets. As insurance premiums rise, we all need to find ways of keeping them affordable. Continue Reading

A lot of car owners will agree that at times auto insurance can get very costly for the ordinary budget. And having to deal with the economic recession, most of us would agree that learning how to cut insurance costs effectively is a necessity these days. When every dollar counts, getting smart about your expenses is the best way to cut down your costs without sacrificing insurance coverage. But how do you do that and what should you start with?

Fortunately, it’s not that complicated as it may seem. You just need to ask yourself the right questions about auto insurance in order to determine your exact needs and adjust your policy respectively. There are four questions that are very important, so make sure you put them right and get a definite answer:

Do I have the right coverage amount?

Collision and comprehensive coverage is the type, which is mostly influenced by depreciation of the vehicle itself. So if your car is quite old you may want to adjust or even drop collision and comprehensive. Check other types of coverage as well, since your needs could have changed from the moment you’ve purchased the initial policy. Marital status change, moving to another place or changing the car should make you review your policy according to your new needs. Keep the policy up to date and you will always have adequate insurance costs. Continue Reading

There’s a very disturbing trend in vehicle design coming out of Japan and Europe. Unlike Americans who prefer the maximum possible metal around them like a cocoon when they drive, Japanese and Europeans are physically smaller people. They can get into tiny boxes on wheels that look like the type of die-cast Johnny Lightning toys we had as kids. Obviously they don’t eat as much over there. Anyway, these strange things like the Smart Fortwo and other not quite as small vehicles, are now appearing on our city roads. So, they are easy to park and they do an amazing number of miles per gallon. But put them on the same road as SUVs and you have a Goliath vs David problem. In Biblical terms, small may be agile and can get out of trouble fast, but in a straight head-to-head, the mismatch in height is going to be fatal. The problem is that the bumpers don’t match up. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has just published a study based on its crash test data. Even very low speed collisions between vehicles of different heights produces big differences in damage.

As a statement of the obvious, SUV bumpers are set higher on the vehicle and they run over the bumpers on little cars and cause thousands of dollars in damage. Why? Because the SUV bumpers are hitting a part of the smaller vehicle’s body not designed to withstand a collision. What makes the danger worse is that side impact crashes can affect the deployment of the airbags. In any event, if airbags are deployed in a cheaper vehicle, this usually means the insurer decides to total it. Continue Reading