The UK Insurance Blog

In the article “How to get the most from your household budget”  resources were pooled to produce some handy tips on how to stretch our money just that little further.

Moneynet.co.uk adviser Andrew Hagger says “It’s been a tough six months for our bank balances and things won’t get much easier unless we act now.”

How to make considerable savings as well as to get the best value for money that we can by reassessing our household expenditure.

How much do you spend on contents and home insurance? Could it be that another policy would provide cheaper premiums or if not at least provide better value for money?

The cost of borrowing is going through the roof, our fixed-rate mortgages are coming to an end this year and we are all trying to remain optimistic that we are going to make ends meet. Nobody seems prepared for the recent downturn in our economy. From the UK’s biggest companies like Marks & Spencer, Barclays and Taylor Wimpey to the person next door, everybody is having a difficult time of it. The article rightly points out that the person next door only has his wits about him to get through the rough times whereas the big companies can go cap in hand to their city fundraisers.

What it is necessary to do is to look close to home to discover new ways to spend our money more wisely and give our spending a bit of a boost. Begin, Andrew Hagger suggests, by seeing if your mortgage lender will allow you to change to paying interest only for a period. If you could use some breathing space from paying a £140,000 mortgage on 6% then £200 per month will be freed up towards your payments.

A gem of an idea that works instantly, is to avoid daily shopping trips. Instead, do your food shopping once a week. All those ‘in-between’ shopping trips can be costly by the end of the week!

If you plan to make any considerable purchases at all, first of all, check out a price comparison website like kelkoo.co.uk to get the best value for money.

Borrowing on your credit card can result in high interest, so do try to get the best interest rates on the market or consider switching over to a life balance transfer card.

When buying petrol or food, the adviser suggests you should use a credit card with a cash back offer such as the American Express platinum money back card. With this facility you could earn yourself an extra £25 every month for three months if your monthly food and petrol bill is £500.

Why not work out the yearly cost of your car and put the money by every month. Add to this your annual expenditure for birthdays and Christmas and you save yourself the strain of a big bill. This way you can even earn a bit of interest too!

Take a look at your energy suppliers and see if you can’t get a better deal on energy prices somewhere else. Online tariffs or dual fuel tariffs for example may prove somewhat cheaper.

Earn some extra money by sorting through unwanted items and setting up your own stand at a local car boot sale. You could make an easy £100 or so. Or if you prefer to work online then try selling unwanted items on Ebay.

More ideas include organising a work car share instead of forking out for petrol as well as removing your savings out of a minimum interest savings account so you can earn some extra on it in a high interest yield.

The last word is that if we make an effort, looking at our current household expenditure patterns some simple changes can effectively see us riding out the tough times.

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As our towns and cities once again are flooded, a recent article “More than 1/3 of Brits do not have home insurance, despite an increased risk of flooding” in Fair Investment, reveals some surprising results about British homeowners. That even in the face of homes in Britain being absolutely devastated by floods, insurance is not a priority in some households.

You would think the incidences of flooding happening all over the country would be enough to push those currently uninsured to look into acquiring home insurance. Why do we then find that a third of the general public do not feel a need for insurance. What is happening here? The article delves a bit deeper.

With ten per cent of houses up and down the UK at serious risk of flooding (equivalent to up to £214 billion worth of property, assets and land, it comes as a shock to discover that nearly forty per cent of those questioned do not have any house insurance. Breaking it down even further, it was then discovered that men are far less likely than women to purchase house insurance. Only fifty seven per cent of men have house insurance while 64% of women do.

The people at Fair Investment suggest that in this age of frequent flooding and inadequate flood defences that we should all take out home insurance to protect us in the future. Even in these tough financial times, insurance should never be overlooked when flooding could happen to anybody.

People want to buy their insurance online, according to this informative article “New online tool proves price isn’t everything!”.

While we prefer to shop for our insurance online, a leading home insurance provider is enjoying the benefits of providing an online comparison device. Hunting round for the best policy is much more easily achieved on the Internet and more people are catching on to this fact. Defaqto provides independent information taken from market research so you can be sure there is no favouritism going on.

Changes are afoot it would seem. In a recent survey, it was discovered that 34% of insurance buying customers prefer to shop for their policies online. New insurance products being arranged online account for 25% of the insurance buying public as opposed to six years ago when the figure was only 6%.

A lot of people are influenced greatly by the price of insurance quotes rather than taking into account other considerations. While not always top on price, the group are confident future customers will be influenced by quality of service and level of cover. By providing a comparison tool link on their website, Halifax Insurance are confident their products will stand up to competition as long as the customer isn’t only interested in the price. If this fails, a cash incentive is in operation for customers booking their home insurance over the phone as well as up to a thirty five per cent discount if you book online. Food for thought indeed!

An article from the Press Association tells us that Halifax Home Insurance have come up with some startling facts about home restoration projects. It seems that almost three million rooms have vanished over the past five years as homeowners knock down walls to create open-plan living space. An estimated 2.9 million rooms have been knocked into adjoining ones in the past five years, while plans are being made for a further 2.1 million homes to lose at least one room this year, according to the Halifax research.

The most popular wall to knock down is that between the dining room and the living room, with many people believing that the traditional dining room is part of a bygone era. The days of the whole family sitting around a dining table adorned with the best china whilst tucking into roast beef and yorkshire pudding seem to be gone for good. It seems that people now prefer the extra living space that joining the two rooms brings.

Estimations show that a further 590,000 dining rooms will be destroyed this year to create bigger kitchens or lounges and that the traditional standalone dining room could be extinct by 2020.

Larger living areas are also being created by knocking through the walls between living room and hallway or getting rid of utility rooms or studies to get bigger lounges, kitchens, bathrooms and bedrooms.

The worrying point about all this alteration work is that one in four people are planning to knock down walls themselves rather than employ a tradesman. At the same time half of people who carry out work don’t realise that they have to inform their insurer that the number of rooms is about to change, and that failing to do so could invalidate their house insurance.

David Rochester, head of underwriting at Halifax Home Insurance, said: “Britons have clearly fallen for open-plan living and are looking at ways in which they can make better use of the space inside their homes. Not only do we urge homeowners to make sure a qualified person carries out any structural work to their home, we also recommend seeking the advice of a qualified structural engineer before progressing work to knock down any walls.”

We’ve all seen the Fawlty Towers episode where Basil gets in a local firm of cheap builders to knock down a wall, only to find that they’ve removed a major retaining wall and the whole place is likely to collapse at any moment. Nobody is suggesting that such a farce could take place in your home but insurance companies get hundreds of claims each year for collapsed ceilings etc that are the result of people taking down the “wrong” wall, and the insurance companies simply don’t pay out on those claims, so be warned.

We’ve finally got round to setting up the blog that will let us keep you informed of what’s happening in the UK insurance market. It’s a huge area that affects us all, since car insurance is mandatory for all vehicles and you’d be a brave man in this day and age to fail to insure your house and its contents.

We’ll bring you details of any special offers that might save you some money but we also intend to offer you a better insight into the UK insurance market with some detailed articles on various aspects of the subject that you might find of interest. The first of these articles looks at how your location affects the car insurance premiums of different insurers. It’s an interesting read that emphasises our message that you should shop around for the best deals and never accept an insurance renewal without checking the market.