Financial & Travel Musings

The problem with life insurance policies is that they generally run for a very long time indeed.

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.

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You’d think that two cars would only mean twice the complications with the car insurance but it generally seems that it’s more like ten times the hassle, at least for us.

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.

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Car insurance is a peculiar thing where customer loyalty seems to mean nothing for the majority of companies.

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.

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