Gor Blimey Guvnor! you can knock me darn wiv a fether....

Our insurances are both due for renewal in a few weeks so I have been doing the annual ring around and web price checking thing.

Last year I got what I thought was a good deal on my i10 which was changed for a Citigo at the end of the year. £130 fully comp with a low excess. protected NCB etc.

I have just done a web quote for a certain nautical company which offers dual car insurance.

I was a bit concerned about things like who keeps their NCB and what about business mileage (SWMBO drives a car between appointments for work).

Turns out for each car you can specify the type of use for each driver and also who will earn the NCB on that car.

So ......

For a 62 plate 140 Elegance Yeti and a 62 Citigo Elegance with 8k of mileage on each per annum, £250 excess, drivers aged 59 and 57 with 9+ NCB each a TOTAL premium of £329 and a few pennies.

When we had the 320d and the Octavia our combined annual running costs for insurance and tax was nearly £1000 now it will be less than half that.. woo hoo.

Gor Blimey Guvnor! you can knock me darn wiv a fether....

'Scuse, Geoff - spelling - fevver

Seriously, nice quotation!

Eh by gum 8k a year ain't much mines at least 18k!

I went with sainsbury's insurance this year following a quote from confused.com, they were much cheaper than all the others.

double nectar points as well, shame I dont shop there!

whatever happened to quicksave?

I have just done a web quote for a certain nautical company which offers dual car insurance.

I think you're at liberty to say you they are, vegit8.

As you know I have a Yeti and an i10 auto. (dearer to insure than a manual by about a tenner).

My wife and I are similar to yourself in terms of region, NCB and age.

The Yeti premium this year is £150 (Saga) and the i10 premium was £144 (Adrian Flux/AXA) I checked and a top of the range Citigo would have been nearer to £100 at the time. Thus a Yeti and a Citigo with different companies would have been around £250. However our mileage is lower than yours (5000) and one car is garaged and I haggled hard with them both so your figure sounds fair, bearing in mind no two people are ever quoted the same figure, even with virtually identical circumstances.

I have just done a web quote for a certain nautical company which offers dual car insurance.

Good luck. With a certain nautical insurance company you gets what you pays for: http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews11381.html

And the same is true of a certain canine insurance company: http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews2627.html . Ohhh yesss.

Good luck. With a certain nautical insurance company you gets what you pays for: http://www.reviewcen...views11381.html

And the same is true of a certain canine insurance company: http://www.reviewcen...eviews2627.html . Ohhh yesss.

Just one article on the topic reads as follows.......

http://www.lovemoney.com/news/cars-computers-and-sport/car-insurance/11730/the-multicar-insurance-ripoff

Quoting reviews in isolation is all well and good, but I find that I could have searched elsewhere on the net and found glowing reports...which would have had equally limited significance.

It must surely be the case that there are some well respected institutions/companies/organizations that seem to draw almost universal acclaim or, conversely, condemnation. John Lewis springs to mind re. the former. TalkTalk or Santander might possibly fall in to the latter. But almost everyone has there own story to tell regarding Insurance Companies and in all honesty the only company that readily springs to mind for receiving good reports is NFU. However (and this may be the point being made here) my own quote from them was between two and three times higher than the one I eventually accepted (see above....Adrian Flux and Saga). There is (at the moment at least) a local, well staffed office of the old style, with people sitting at desks on the phone, filling forms in and at their computers and looking very old fashioned compared to the web based experiences more common today......and the cover is probably good and therefore you pays yer money and takes yer chance. I'm happy enough to take my chances with my chosen insurers and hope it's OK on the night, but in my experience, paying more doesn't automatically guarantee getting better service.

Admiral Multi-Car policy?

Took one of these out recently for the first time, saved quite a bit too.

I moved from admiral on a multicar policy last year because 2 seperate policies from Saga were cheaper for me and SWMBO. At the time I had my 3 month old 1.4TSI octy SE+ and ed indorrs her 57 plate 1.9 PD Seat Altea. 12 months on and the BL has only cost an extra £36 over the TSI. Saga are 1 of which's better recommended insurers too so it's a bit of a win win as far as I'm concerned...

in my experience, paying more doesn't automatically guarantee getting better service.

Indeed not: one could make another list of insurance companies that are not very cheap and still offer lousy service.

A feature of the car insurance market is that for many people the only thing that matters is price. A lot of people can barely afford insurance and resent having to obtain it: all they care about is having a valid piece of paper to keep the police from confiscating and crushing their car. This gives rise to a whole market segment where insurers quote unrealistically low prices and do so by refusing claims, dragging their feet on pay-outs, having inadequate levels of customer service, etc. Many of their customers who fall into the category I've mentioned will not be deterred by any of that, since they care only about a low premium and aren’t very interested in how they might be treated if they make a claim. But people on this board, who mostly have cars worth more than (say) £12k and who are mostly not irresponsible twenty-somethings lacking the foresight to imagine they could ever be involved in a claim, it's probably not the segment of the market they’ll be happy with if the worst comes to the worst.

Yes, NFU are great at the personal touch and as you say, hugely expensive for cars unless you also have a few hundred thousand pounds' worth of agricultural property to insure with them. Their old-fashioned approach is not all good news, though. Last year they quoted me in writing for a BMW with a 4.8-litre engine. I had made it very clear which model it was. The premium they quoted was so low I suspected a mistake. When I queried it, they confessed they had been unable to find the 4.8-litre car on their lists and so had assumed it was the same model as the 2-litre. It was much nicer dealing with them than with a person in a call centre, but they weren't any more competent.

When dealing with insurers I find it useful to remember that they all regularly pay out more in claims than they take in premiums. As Warren Buffett (who runs one of the world's largest re-insurers, Gen Re) has often made clear, the insurance business makes money in a quite different way: from the float. That is, they take the premiums well in advance of making the pay-outs, and they make money according to how effectively they can invest your money until you come demanding it. Worth bearing in mind when comparing the cost of a single annual premium versus instalments.

All of the above noted with interest in addition to the comments in the rest of the posts here.

I've been allotted enough common sense to realise that I don't know it all - quite the opposite - so am not claiming the high ground, however I have inherited a a dollop of pedantry which dictates that I keep looking at the sentence .......... But people on this board, who mostly have cars worth more than (say) £12k and who are mostly not irresponsible twenty-somethings lacking the foresight to imagine they could ever be involved in a claim, it's probably not the segment of the market they’ll be happy with if the worst comes to the worst. And there's a word missing. I think it's the word "for" and should be inserted at the beginning of the sentence just after the "but" and before "people". The alternative is to drop the "ing" from "lacking".....and to do so sheds a very different meaning to the sentence and isn't one I think you mean to impart.

Isn't English wonderful ! .... (I think a question mark is due just there...) I just wish I had a better command of it.

However - I'm struggling to draw conclusions or lessons here insofar as the point is made that to buy the very cheapest, for the reasons outlined above, is foolish. And to buy the dearest from NFU isn't going to prevent mistakes from occurring. And to look at reviews can be misleading because everyone has different experiences with their insurers and only really get to find out how good or bad they are when they claim. And no two people have the same circumstances, either before a claim, or after.

I had a claim when my car was "car-jacked". My car was stolen and never seen again. It was dealt with by Morethan / Royal Sun Alliance. They were fine...great in fact...and I remained with them for years afterwards. However I eventually got fed up when they transferred their call centre "overseas". And I do like to have a coherent conversation with the people who are dealing with my financial affairs, and if I can't understand them - and they can't understand me, then it's time to change.

There aren't any fixed rules or guidelines that I can identify. I think you stand a far better chance of making an informed decision about the wisdom of your purchase when buying a washing machine. And then there's this business about car hire scams during repairs and bodyshop backhanders and then there's the problem of people reversing in to you and claiming whiplash and whether you ought to buy a dashcam. And if I have an accident that wasn't my fault will it still be knock for knock? And will my premiums go up even though I have protected my bonus?

Ohhhhh.....dear......time for bed!

And there's a word missing. I think it's the word "for" and should be inserted at the beginning of the sentence just after the "but" and before "people".

Quite right; thanks.

However - I'm struggling to draw conclusions or lessons here insofar as the point is made that to buy the very cheapest, for the reasons outlined above, is foolish. And to buy the dearest from NFU isn't going to prevent mistakes from occurring. And to look at reviews can be misleading because everyone has different experiences with their insurers ...

There aren't any fixed rules or guidelines that I can identify.

I agree with all that. My own approach, for what it's worth, has two prongs: (a) I have a long-standing relationship with a firm of insurance brokers whom I see at least once a year face-to-face and phone quite often. He (or more often she) comes up with good recommendations and switches my business to a new insurer every couple of years or so when he finds a better deal. He can talk to the people at the insurers who have the power to make offers, so he sometimes come back to me and says, for example, ' Insurer X wants £450 to insure your BMW but will do it for £250 if we place all your other business with them'. He/she does not recommend companies with rubbish service, as they are dealing with hundreds of customers and know who the bad guys are. When I have had trouble, for example with a repair company who did a shoddy job, the broker leans on them for me and makes it very clear they will not get paid unless they shape up.

But there is also prong B. My brokers offer a very useful service, but they cannot always quote the best price, so I shop around myself once a year to ensure they are providing good value. If necessary I go back to them and ask if they can match the prices I have obtained elsewhere. They sometimes say yes, sometimes no, and are often willing to refer me to competitors who they know may be able to offer a better deal. In return the brokers know that I will always give them the chance to quote, even if I place some business elsewhere. It's a proper business relationship founded on openness, respect, co-operation, and mutual advantage.

For me this is as near as one can get to the best of both worlds. As a family we are insuring 5 cars and several houses, and at times less than half that business ends up being placed through the broker, at other times more than half, but the broker always gets the first call and invitation to quote. The best mix changes all the time. For two of the family, responsible doctors in their early twenties with no driving history, by far the best deal I found was a telemetric (or telematic) policy: a black box in the car that monitors every aspect of their driving. It is saving them around a thousand a year. Which? magazine has an article on black box car insurance forthcoming in the March issue. I have seen some of it already, for reasons I won't go into, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest.

Edited 12 January, 201313 yr by r999