Is minimum coverage enough? It depends who's asking

Most insurance sites answer this question with a sales pitch in either direction. Here's the honest version: minimum coverage is genuinely right for some drivers and genuinely dangerous for others, and telling them apart takes about four questions.

What 30/60/15 actually buys

California's minimum pays for injuries and damage you cause to others: $30,000 per person, $60,000 per accident, $15,000 property damage. It never fixes your own car, and those numbers are the ceiling — anything above them comes from you personally.

Minimum coverage genuinely fits you if…

• Your car's value is low and you could absorb losing it
• You have few assets a lawsuit could reach
• The alternative is driving uninsured — minimum beats nothing, every time

It quietly endangers you if…

• You have savings or a home. A serious at-fault accident can exceed the minimums fast; the excess is your problem. Liability protects your assets, and you have assets.
• You couldn't replace your car out of pocket. Liability-only means an at-fault crash totals your transportation with no payout.
• Your car is financed — lenders require full coverage anyway.

The middle path almost nobody prices

The jump from minimum to meaningfully higher liability limits usually costs less than people assume — and adding uninsured-motorist coverage (against California's many uninsured drivers) is cheap protection for you rather than for others. Before defaulting to bare minimum, price the middle: it's often the best value on the whole menu.

The four questions, written out

Ten minutes with a pen settles this better than any general advice:

1. What could you produce in a hurry? Savings you could reach in a few weeks without it becoming a second emergency. Be unimpressive and honest — this is the amount of self-insurance you are already carrying whether you meant to or not.
2. What could be reached over time? Home equity, investments, future income. What can actually be reached in a judgment is a legal question that depends on your circumstances, so an attorney is the right source — for this exercise, just note whether there is something you would be badly hurt to lose.
3. What do you drive among? Property damage exposure is set by what you might hit, not by what you drive. Dense freeway commuting raises the realistic ceiling on a claim regardless of how modest your own car is.
4. What does the step up actually cost? Not an assumption — a real quote at your current limits and one step above.

What changes the answer over time

Limits chosen at one point in life stop matching quietly, because nobody writes to tell you that your circumstances moved. Revisit when you buy a home, when savings become meaningful, when a new driver joins the household, when your income changes materially, or when a vehicle is paid off.

Note the review date on your policy documents in pen. That single habit prevents the most common problem here — a decision that was right once and was never made again.

Where the honest middle usually lands

For most households that run the four questions properly, the answer is not "minimum" and not "everything". It is raising property damage first, because it is the limit most likely to be reached and typically the least expensive to increase, then taking one step up on bodily injury, and pricing uninsured motorist as a separate line.

Get those figures before deciding. The assumption that higher limits are unaffordable is the reason a great many people carry the state minimum, and it is an assumption worth testing rather than accepting.