Tips for saving money on your insurance
Don’t just accept you new quote from your existing provider on your Home and Car Insurance policies. After mortgages, this is the easiest area to reduce your outgoings by obtaining alternative insurers. According to the AA, the average quote of £629 for car insurance falls to £415 if you shop around, while home insurance tumbles from £385 to £250. It is incredibly eay to find quotes on the internet, and if you don’t spend at least one lunch hour a year finding a better deal then saving money is not important.
1. Investigate your Loan protection insurance
Pricey and poorly sold, Payment Insurance is one of the most lucrative types of insurance created by the finance industry. It can add £3,000 to the cost of a £7,500 unsecured loan. Many whom were sold PPI were always unable to claim against it This money is now eligible to be claimed back.
Many companies will attempt to claim the money back, but you will pay a 25% premium on the monies awarded. Instead, try the freetouse Financial Ombudsman Service on average they are helping 80% of those missold . Helpfully, it offers a factsheet on how to make a complaint about PPI which you can find at financialombudsman.org.uk
2. Cancel your mobile phone insurance
Naive youngsters are strongly pressured in phone shops into spending between £60 and £70 a year on this insurance cover. But the benefits are minimal: most won’t cover you for the only major risk, airtime abuse (if your phone is ued to call overseas, and you can claim for a lost phone on you contents cover.
Mobile insurance is usually set up as a monthly direct debit, so it’s a very easy one to cancel.
3. Rethink your life insurance
You don’t have to keep you life insurance policy for the whole of the policies term. Just because the life assurance was sold to you when you took out a mortgage doesn’t mean you have to stick with that provider for the life of the remortgage. You have the option to cancel at any time and find a better deal. With the human lifetime improving (ie. fewer people dying), life insurance companies have been lowering the cost of life insurance for more than a decade.
If you are in a job at a big employer, it is likely to offer “death in service” benefit worth as much as three times your yearly salary, and often a lot more. Do you really need all that term insurance on top as well?
4. Don’t pay for travel insurance you don’t need
Step 1 Obtain a European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) from ehic.org.uk or at your local Post Office. This has replaced the old E111 forms and gives you reducedcost or free medical treatment in EU countries and Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. You may even obtain treatment faster, as you won’t have to rely on a hospital waiting to receive authorisation to treat you from an insurer.
Step 2 Check your home insurance policy. cover is often provided when outside your home.
Step 3 Check your health cover policy, if you have one. These often pay treatment costs incurred abroad. For most holidaymakers, who travel to southern Europe once a year, the only real benefit that travel insurance cover brings is cancellation cover. Is that worth the premiums.
For those who travel outside the EU, travel insurance is a must, though. If you go away more than once a year it is best to take a annual policy don’t pay for what you don’t need. For example, f you don’t ski or snowboard, you don’t need winter sports cover.
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 3:44 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.