Car Insurance - A Lesson Learned
Monday, March 17th, 2008If you’ve read any of my earlier blog posts or you’ve taken a look at the insurance web site you will have seen my advice to shop around for insurance and not take the easy way out by renewing with your current insurer.
So a couple of weeks back I received my car insurance renewal from Tesco. It’s paid by direct debit, so the easy way out is to do nothing and let it carry on. Struck by a feeling of guilt at contemplating renewal with Tesco, I did the honourable thing and got online quotes from some other insurers.
I’ve been with Tesco for a few years now, when I took out the policy they were ultra-competitive and I couldn’t see any reason why this would have changed. The renewal quote of £315.00 for fully comp insurance, £55.65 for my protected no-claims bonus and £95.55 for breakdown insurance all looked reasonable to me, giving a grand total of £466.20.
You can imagine my surprise when a quote from More Th>n came to £298.60 for exactly the same options. I don’t have the figures to hand but each of the three components was cheaper and even the cost of spreading the payments over the year was charged at 13.7% APR rather than the 23.6% APR charged by Tesco.
The regular advice is to compare the policy options between the providers in order to confirm that you’re comparing like with like and I’ve done that. The other advice often handed out is that you should take into account the service offered by the various companies. Trouble was that I’d never claimed either on the motor insurance or the breakdown insurance, so how was I to know how I’d have been treated ?.
The change from Tesco to More Th>n was very simple, I only had to give my Tesco policy number for them to confirm my no-claim discount and that was that. I saved over 30% on what I considered to be a competitive car insurance policy by simply getting a few more quotes.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
