An automotive insurance company will invariably find out and examine your driving record and credit report before it makes any transaction with you. It will determine your rates based on its findings. There is almost no driving related fact that you can hide from them, so it is better to come clean at the outset. Therefore, before you purchase insurance you need to gather all the information you can about your driving record and your credit history.
Your driving record for the past ten years should be enough because insurance companies usually do not bother to look further than that. How far back they will look varies from company to company. What they are interested in is the number of tickets and accidents, if any, that show on your driving record. Find out which insurance company will look at the record of the least number of years in your past. This is important in cases where the driving record shows improvement in driving over time. You may have been a not-so-good driver eight or nine years back but have improved over the last two or three years. So you would want your insurance company to consider the records of the last two or three years only.
Insurance companies also look at your credit reports, which can be easily obtained from an agency that reports credit information. Therefore, it is important to have a clean credit history. If you are thinking about terminating your existing credit policy (in case you have one), it is best that you do it following the proper official procedure. Terminating a policy by not paying your bill at the end of a term is inadvisable. This is because the insurance company marks you as a defaulter and mentions it in your credit report, which negatively affects the possibility of your getting insurance from other companies in the future.