I had my renewal documents through from my current insurer today for my car. I don’t believe in “loyalty” in terms of insurance, I go with whoever gives me the best quote that year for the maximum amount of cover and ‘little niceties’ such as a lower compulsory excess, or free breakdown cover etc.

So I went with my present insurer last year because Tesco wanted to charge me £600 to renew with them; A £200 increase. I shopped around for all of 2 minutes and came to the conclusion that The Post Office was my best bet, and went with them instead. They’ve now sent me a renewal proposal for £431! That’s an increase of almost £150 on last years price, and for absolutely no reason at all. Nothing has changed on the car, or the policy in that time.  I’ve just phoned them and told them to shove it up their arse.

So, shop around, try some comparison websites, try a few of the “you won’t find us on comparison websites” ones and loe, the cheapest I can now find is £302 but with quite poor cover options and a brand name that, quite frankly, doesn’t inspire too much confidence (Qwik Fit? For car insurance? Please…).

The best I could come up with was Direct Line.  £372 all in, for the lowest compulsory excess (£0), they’d only accept a maximum voluntary excess of £350 (the others all wanted around £5-600 for a similar price), breakdown cover, guaranteed 21-day replacement like-for-like car, glass cover, protected maximum no claim bonus, legal cover, business use and lots of other bits and pieces.

So it seems that generally, the cost of insurance is on the way up when most people are least likely to be able to afford it. I find that disgusting really. The fine for not having insurance if stopped is only £200… and yes, the thought did eversobriefly cross my mind…

This entry was posted on Friday, June 5th, 2009 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.