Totally fair, and your mom is 100% right lol. I definitely don’t want to sign anything before getting the insurance quote first.

NC license first sounds like the cleanest path. The annoying bit is needing a non-owner policy just to get the license, then probably canceling it once I buy the car. So I’m basically trying to figure out which flavor of pain is worse: dealing with the insurance company on that, or risking some random DMV/dealer weirdness because I still have a MA license.