Financial & Travel Musings » Finance

Lots of little accidents = higher car insurance

Arnold — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:31:57 +0000

One thing you can be sure of is that the car insurance companies will use any excuse to increase the car insurance rates and the icy weather is the excuse that they’ll be using when the rates go up the next time.

You can’t really blame them this time around as there definitely has been a rise in the number of small accidents arising from the icy roads. Unfortunately, they can’t claim anything back from the various branches of the government that should have been doing something about those roads so instead it’s the insurance companies and hence us that end up paying for this.

Still, at least it’s not so daft as the argument put forward this morning by the local government representative who claimed that they couldn’t do the work as it would mean that their ratepayers would end up paying for it. Her argument was that since “the department” had loads of money, they should pay for it. Actually, it makes no difference in the end as those ratepayers are the tax payers who provided the “loads of money” so the choice is between paying it via the council taxes or through income taxes but they’ll end up paying for it either way.

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Do you really need life insurance?

Arnold — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 11:07:48 +0000

Most people would say that they do if they have a mortgage but that’s not the case at all.

Instead of looking for a life insurance quote, what you should really be hunting for is a good term assurance quote. The difference is that the life insurance is for your whole life whereas term assurance would be merely for the term of your mortgage. That difference makes for a substantial reduction in the cost of the insurance and you can even reduce it more if you have a repayment mortgage by getting reducing term assurance which matches the cover to the amount of the outstanding mortgage.

Are cash advances worth getting?

Arnold — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 20:59:24 +0000

Having to get a cash advance on a credit card is generally considered as the most expensive way to get money. After all, you’re usually paying interest from the moment you get the advance so it’s bound to be expensive, isn’t it?

Well, yes, but if you’re stuck in some far flung spot towards the end of your holiday and ain’t got any cash left there’s rarely any other option. The key thing to remember in such situations is that even a cash advance isn’t astronomically expensive so long as you are aware of how the charges work. It varies depending on your bank but in most cases there will be a charge of around 2% with a minimum of £2 or so for the cash advance and interest of around 2% per month from the day you take the advance. Thus if you take £100 and pay it back within a month it’s going to cost you around £4 which isn’t all that bad really.

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Complexity in the car insurance quotes

Arnold — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 10:13:44 +0000

We’ve still got our car insured with the French insurer but that’s going to have to change in the next few months as we’re at point where we either need to import the car or sell it.

The problem is that car insurance quotes aren’t so simple with an imported car so we have to put more effort into the process than usual. Our first problem is that the car is a model that was never sold in this country. Although the only different from models that were sold here is that it’s diesel, that means that we can’t use any of the cheapo online places that give you an instant quote and are into emailing the details and waiting for an answer. So far, those quotes have been about triple the going rate for the car which seems a touch over the top.

Thus, we’ve now gotten together a short list of specialist brokers which should come up with a more sensible quote for us.

Dreadful diseases

Arnold — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:04:44 +0000

Medical advances are wonderful but with each one comes a whole bunch of issues that didn’t arise before.

For instance, it sounds like a good thing to be able to extend life, doesn’t it? Well, only if you are healthy and that’s where the problem lies: in too many cases these days the lives extended aren’t really worth living. Say, for instance, you have an asbestosis related disease like Mesothelioma you can find that your extended life is basically one that’s visibly going downhill as each week passes. That’s just one of the dreadful diseases that medical advances can give you the ability to experience for longer these days.

Even without having one of the dreadful diseases as such even just extending life isn’t really as great a bonus as you might expect it to be. These days nursing homes are filling up with people who are sailing at various rates into what’s effectively a non-thinking person which isn’t too good for them and is awful for their families.

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Getting your life insurance rates down

Arnold — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:23:31 +0000

Although you probably shop around for life insurance to keep your costs down where you can really get the costs down is by looking for the right type of life insurance.

In most cases what people really need is term insurance rather than life insurance and you’ll find that the best term life insurance rates are substantially below the life insurance rates. The reason for that is simple: whereas with life insurance the insurance company is basically taking a bet on when you’ll die, with term insurance they have a fixed date to work with. That works out well for you too as chances are you want the insurance to cover a mortgage which is for a fixed term too.

Heading into the winter season so ’tis time to wind down the holiday equipment

Arnold — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:11:05 +0000

If you’ve had a reasonable summer season chances are that it’s time to get the pre-winter maintenance tasks done before putting all the equipment away ’til the next season.

The physical things are easy enough to identify and though they’re a bit of a pain to do they need doing before everything is put away or you’ll just have a whole heap of trouble next time you try to use the stuff. Where it’s less obvious is for the intangible things like motorhome insurance which is something that’s very easily forgotten about but, if anything, even more important than getting the lawnmower cleaned.

Exit signs for the recession

Arnold — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:47:20 +0000

It’s been a long time coming but at least now we are starting to see some of the exit signs to this recession.

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.

Into the cycle of insurance quotes again

Preparing for armageddon

Arnold — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 15:54:32 +0000

When you’ve a sequence of events such as we’ve had over the last couple of years I’m sure that the thoughts of many people will have turned towards thoughts of preparations in case even more goes wrong.

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?

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Why is it that we need to be SOLD insurance?

Arnold — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:54:33 +0000

Insurance is one of the limited number of products that need to be sold to us rather than being a product that we’d go out and buy for ourselves.

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.