Costs are high all around – so cut your insurance bill

Van insurance news roundup: 7 days ending 3 mar 2013:

Everyone’s hurting in the current economy, but there are ways to save on your car insurance or van insurance even in this day and age, believe it or not!

March is upon us, and you and I both know what that means: nearly everyone will be looking for a new annual insurance quote, whether it be for their family car or their van or commercial vehicle. Costs have been going up like mad over the past few years, but apparently up to one out of three don’t bother to take steps to reduce our bill, according to a research article I read recently.

A car insurance comparison site found that as many as 8.7 million motorists in the UK aren’t taking their annual policy seriously and are just automatically renewing their cover for another year. Taken together, these drivers could be losing out on an eye watering £2.5 billion by not shopping around for a better deal – and that works out to almost £300 a driver on average!

Believe it or not, the research also said that three million Brits have been labouring under the same insurance provider for a decade or more. I haven’t even had the same pair of trousers for more than ten years, let alone the same insurance provider, so it just blows my mind that someone could stick with an insurer for such a long, long time.

The truth is, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you aren’t switching to the best deal you can find every year, as insurers have absolutely no requirement to provide you with any sort of loyalty advantage for sticking it out. In fact, many insurers will raise rates year-on-year to their existing customers in order to provide better, more enticing offers to those willing to switch, so you’re definitely leaving yourself in a poor position.

Of course, you may end up getting a bum deal where there truly are no better options out there when it comes to your insurance premiums. In a situation like this, you may want to consider breaking the mold as it were and look into a telematics-based insurance cover instead, as these satnav-based insurance policies are gaining quite a bit of ground in popularity.

Telematics has been in the news lately as well thanks to its quick growth, and where it used to be that you needed to have a specific ‘black box’ device fitted to your car, there are some insurers that are coming out with smartphone apps that work the exact same way as the traditional telematics device. This makes it much less expensive to start a telematics-based policy as you don’t need to shell out upwards of a few hundred pounds for a device and instead just download a free app for your mobile phone, and with it being so much more easy to access telematics cover, it could grow even more popular in the near future.

© 2024 All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. See our copyright notice.

Share your views

To leave a comment on this story, please insert your details below.