Financial & Travel Musings

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.

Popularity: 1% [?]

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.

Popularity: 1% [?]

The problem with insurance is that although we all know that we need it, we generally don’t want to think about it.

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.

Popularity: 1% [?]