By now most Florida drivers know that fines are not the only thing that comes with traffic tickets. As I have discussed numerous times, traffic tickets also cause your insurance rates to increase. Actually, they do not just cause an increase in insurance rates, traffic tickets can cause your insurance rates to skyrocket, sometimes by as much as 50%. If that’s not reason enough to call a lawyer when you get a traffic ticket in Florida, the tickets also come with points against your driver’s license. No, the points are not like a basketball or football game. You do not want more points. The points that you can get with traffic tickets are bad. You want as few of them as you can possibly get. This also goes for you out of state drivers who get tickets in our fair state. Those Florida traffic ticket points will show up on your home state’s drivers license.

Florida traffic ticket points can accumulate over time. If you get enough of them, your driver’s license will be automatically suspended. This is a very common reason for driver’s licenses in Florida to get suspended because it is fairly easy to accumulate points against your license. Almost any ticket that you receive carries with it a point total. The good news is that the points only accumulate for so long. They will stay on your driving record forever, but eventually they will no longer count against you. Unfortunately, it takes three years before the points stop counting against you. That means that a speeding ticket you got almost three years ago can cause you to get your license suspended tomorrow. Here’s how it works: If you get 12 points in 12 months, your license will be suspended for 30 days. If you get 18 points in 18 months, your license will be suspended for 3 months. Finally, if you get 24 points in 36 months, your license will be suspended for 12 months.

With how easy it can be to get traffic tickets in Florida, unlucky people can accumulate points quickly and have to worry about the possibility that an old ticket might be just enough to cause them to lose their driving privileges for a year. If you have to drive to get to work like most people in South Florida, then you can even lose your job because of how long the points count against you. Of course, once you do get your driver’s license back, you will have to pay increased insurance rates. If you get another ticket after that, things will start to get even worse. In my years as a traffic ticket lawyer, I have seen so many clients, who are otherwise law abiding citizens, get jammed up because of unpaid tickets and points.

It’s because of things like this that as a Florida traffic ticket lawyer, I can say you should never pay a traffic ticket. I repeat, never pay a traffic ticket. All you do by paying the ticket is to make it easy for the state to add points to your license and easy for your insurance company to increase your rates even if you are not any more likely to really need to make an insurance claim. Fortunately, you can almost always fight a ticket and not get any points against your driver’s license. You just need to hire an experienced Florida traffic ticket lawyer. The lawyer can work with you to get the ticket off your record, speeding tickets can stay on your record for the 20 years. Our firm has handled hundreds of thousands of traffic tickets with an excellent success rate. If you would like to know more, please call our offices next time you get a traffic ticket and I, Jason Diamond, will give you a free consultation.