It does not matter how well you prepare for it, the cost of insuring a teenage driver can result in major shock. Car insurance for teens can be quite expensive. Adding a single teenage girl can cause your premiums to double immediately, and adding a boy can increase your rates by as much as three times what you’re currently paying. It’s almost enough to make you wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to just put up with another year or two of driving your teen around town. That’s not to say that there’s no hope, though. There are definitely steps you can take to find affordable car insurance for teens and minimize the effects on your wallet.

While, your teen driver has to be insured if he or she is going to get behind the wheel, here are four things you can do to keep the costs as low as possible.

  1. Give Your Teen a Cheaper Yet Safe Vehicle

Choose your teen’s car with insurance in mind. If you want to buy your teen a car, forget about getting the model of his or her dreams. Instead, get a car that boasts high safety ratings. That means striking a careful balance between getting a car that’s new enough to have modern safety features and yet not so new that repairs would be unusually expensive.

  1. Encourage Your Teen to Attain Good Grades in School

As your teen approaches driving age, take a close look at his or her academics. Most insurance companies offer some form of good student discount, usually available to all teens with a “B” average or better. If that’s at all attainable, encourage your teen to put in the extra time necessary to do it. Depending on your provider, the discounts can be as high as 20-30%.

  1. Enroll Your Teen in Driver’s Education

Even if you’re not able to benefit from a good student discount, you’ll find that many insurance providers are willing to extend additional discounts if your teen completes extra driver’s education. While private driver’s education classes can be costly in their own right, you’ll also get the satisfaction of knowing that your teen received extra supervised practice.

  1. Parents Promote Safe Driving!

Make sure your teen understands that his or her driving practices influence the cost of insurance. The worst thing your teen can do is rack up points on his or her driving record for speeding or failing to obey other traffic laws.

With proper planning, you should be able to find some way to make your teen’s car insurance rates affordable. Further, by taking cost-reducing measures like purchasing a safer car or taking extra driving classes, you’re also taking steps that reduce the likelihood that your teen will be injured in an accident and that’s the most important thing of all.