Availability of jobs seems to be going up at a time of year when they’d normally be dropping off. Not in every job category just yet but the rise in availability of IT jobs is welcome as that generally comes ahead of increases in jobs in other categories.

Most noticeable for most people is the rise in the number of “sold” signs on houses. That’s a sign that the banks are easing up the mortgage requirements but may be a little misleading as it can seem to go backwards once the current crop of approved mortgages goes through.

Still, overall it’s nice to see that some of the early exit signs are now visible.

That’s why the price of gold has been sailing rather high of course. However, just as these days you wouldn’t want to have all your money in one bank so too you shouldn’t have it all in one class of assets either. Thus people consider things like silver but that’s really not all that different in qualities to gold itself.

Much better to look at a store of value that’s quite different and that’s where diamonds come in. They’re radically different in that they’ve not got the industrial value that gold has in the sense that they’re not used as components in quite so many products. Rather they’re generally seen in limited industrial markets (low quality gems go there naturally) though in practical terms it’s the precious stones market that’s most significant.

One wonders what next can happen? We’ve had the economy tanking, the bankrupt banks, swine flu and a volcano. Perhaps it’s time for a major solar flare to really mess us up?

That has the effect that insurance marketing is a little different than normal marketing. Historically it’s been very much hard-sell though successive laws and advertising restrictions have eliminated most of the more obnoxious methods that have been used in the past. Even so, it’s still quite often one of those hard-sell products.

But why is that? After all, in principle, insurance is a good idea. It’s there for those times when the unexpected happens and aims to provide you with resources that you just couldn’t rally together by yourself. Unfortunately, the hard-sell required has reduced many of those advantages and, in some cases, can even totally neglect them. Perhaps the worst example are the savings type “insurance” policies that almost everyone has bought at one time or another. Buy them after you’re around 60 or so and you’ll find that they will be quite consistent in paying you back less than you paid them, yet 60+ year olds continue to buy them.

The best example should be house insurance yet the insurance companies have introduced so many loop holes that it hardly seems worthwhile to pay it. Right now we’re finding out the hard way that the insurance company decided to radically downgrade our own house insurance policy without telling us so we’ve almost ten times the excess to pay and things that we thought were covered (and should have been covered) aren’t.

Consider my Dad who died a couple of years ago. He had policies dating back to the 1930s that we know of and probably a number of others that we don’t know of.

Although life insurance is one of those “good things” that you know you should have, the snag is that having such policies means a commitment to pay them for a rather long time and to keep the original policy documents just as long. I’m sure there are loads of people out there who have a number of long since forgotten about policies as over such a long time you’ve moved house a few times and the insurance company itself has probably been taken over a few times as well.

Is it worthwhile spending time on tracking them down? Well, it depends. Most of the 1930s era policies were written in the days when one assumed that one’s children would die and moreover in a time when money was worth more. Typically, “penny policies” are commonly found and even after such a long time they’re not worth more than a couple of hundred pounds. Not money you’d want to throw away obviously but not worth losing sleep over either.

To begin with we’ve the French car which needs insured and indeed imported properly to here. You’d think that would be a doddle these days with all the common European laws and the importing is a fairly simple (if expensive) thing to do. Snag is that our particular car model was never sold here so the insurance for it is really serious cash.

Next up is a change in the insurance of the other car which is going to be a bit of hassle as transferring over our insurance record from France isn’t nearly so simple as you’d expect that it should be.

Oh well, better get going on it I suppose.

That being the case it’s useful to build up a short carinsurancelist for yourself so that you can do a quick check each year. Silly as it may seem, it can save you money even if you have the same car insurance company but buy it through different brokers every year.

I managed to stay with the same insurance company for getting on for 15 years myself but every single year I picked up the “new customer” discount (which can be quite substantial in some cases) by simply getting a different broker to do the quote every year. It sounds like a totally crazy thing to do and one that’s sure not to work but it really does: all I had to do was to alternate between two different brokers over those 15 years and every single year I picked up that “new customer” discount!

Although it’s definitely a pain to do, there’s big bucks to be saved with relatively little time spent.

Thus we have loads of insurance advertising that’s there not so much to actually sell you insurance but to remind you that you need it. Which goes some way to explaining some of the truly peculiar insurance advertising that sometimes gets put out.

What is a hassle though is that the different terms used by the various insurance companies makes choosing between them a whole lot more difficult than it really needs to be. And those terms change over time too. For instance, our current house insurance company broke ranks with the standard £50 excess on claims and took it up to £450 (rather quietly as is the way with downgrades in the terms) which makes what was previously an excellent policy an also-ran one and therefore I’ll be shopping around come the renewal date.

It’s almost always possible to schedule in a new quotation for several months in the future and this dead time is a really great time to do just that. Hardly anyone is using the quotation systems at the moment so your quote will go through much faster and the reminder quotation will turn up just when you need it.

Whereas with the likes of gold, there’s quite an open market for it around the world, in the case of diamonds it’s still largely controlled by De Beers. Essentially they can yank the chain of any diamond buyer through their control of “sights” of loose diamonds which is the means through which the diamonds eventually end up in jewellry (after passing through the hands of many middle-men).

That vice-like grip on the market means that although it’s not a proper open market, it tends to be one that survives all the twists and turns that you would see on other markets for similar precious raw materials. Thus, in theory, no dramatic drops in price which is useful if you think of diamonds holding value.

Except that what “everyone knows” isn’t always correct and it isn’t in this case. Consider the extreme example: say you bought life insurance in advance for your child that kicked in the day of their birth. That would actually be quite expensive as there are heaps of things that can go wrong in a pregnancy and lots of things that can go wrong in the early years too. Thus insurance for the very young can be more expensive than those a little older.

Similar effects continue on throughout ones life. Thus we expect that car insurance will be more expensive for young drivers than older ones. A large part of that is down to the reckless attitude of some young drivers but there’s also the greater experience of older ones once they get over the reckless years. Also as you get older clearly you’re going to pass by the various childhood diseases. Less obviously, there’s an element of what’s effectively luck: older people get to that age partly because of sheer luck over the years.

Thus a life insurance lead needs to consider just what your life situation is to get the best value. Sometimes it’s far from obvious!