The Car Insurance Debacle!

After writing my blogpost about Immediate Changes that we can all make to ourselves a bit of money on our monthly bills I had a little think about my car insurance. Fairly sure it's been nearly a year, hasn't it? Surely?

Upon checking, I noted that I have less than a month to find and start up another year of car insurance. Great! I thought, I've moved to an area with off-road parking and have another year no-claims bonus so that will definitely go down!

OH NO NO. I called RAC who I am currently insured with, they quoted me a monthly payment (I can't afford the cash prices!) of almost £100 up on what I'm currently paying. Sorry, how the bloody hell is that?

I asked the woman in the call centre I contacted why this was. She may have been distracted by her coworkers chavving it up and cackling in the background* but said only that "insurances must have gone up". Helpful, thank you! I asked her to cancel my automatic renewal and promptly dashed off to price comparison websites.


*I'm allowed to be bitchy, I've worked in two call centres. It's what we did.

As many savvy thrifteroos will tell you, don't just stick to the price comparison websites. Many insurers aren't on there. In addition to the price comparison sites I checked Aviva, Churchill, Direct Line, Tesco and others directly. Despite all this, my cheapest quote WAS from a price comparison site.

The insurers are "Diamond". I believe they are a women-only sub-company of Admiral, since they are based in Cardiff. The lowest quote they offered me was £20 a month dearer than my current deal, and sadly that seems to be the best I can find. Now I know this is probably due to the new laws that women can't be sold insurance at a cheaper price -- I say fair enough to that!

Thanks to my cancellations of all those subscriptions it will actually balance out the extra £20 so we won't be WORSE off, but I was hoping to gain some sort of advantage for having driven very safely for another year! Boo.

My top tips for car insurance hunting:

1. Don't just stick to the price comparison websites. Here is a good list of sites and companies to check with and whether or not they are on price comparison sites: CLICK
2. You can tweak your job title to get you a cheaper quote as many of the car insurance sites don't actually have an option for many people's jobs. Money Supermarket has a good little tool to help you
3. Increase your voluntary excess as much as you can muster. I put mine at £350

So there you have it. As I said, this wasn't my thriftiest of ventures as my premium actually increased, but I think I did a good job to get it down to only £20 higher rather than almost £100.

Toodles!