Posts Tagged ‘home insurance policies’

Top tips for this year’s UK holidaymakers!

Monday, May 18th, 2009

What with swine flu and the ever dropping pound value it seems those of us determined to have a holiday are finding that all roads point to a destination in the UK. We can fight it or we can resign ourselves to enjoy the predicted glorious summer sunshine in our home nation.

According to the article “Four top tips for a happy UK holiday” foreign travel was down 6% in the last three months of 2008 than the last quarter of 2007. The article goes on to state that it is unlikely this trend will change in 2009 what with unemployment continuing to grow the way it is.

Now that we’ve decided to stay in the UK for this year’s summer holidays some top tips to make it a successful one need some consideration. A big one is that of insurance. Just because we are not going abroad it is not the case that we won’t be requiring insurance. What if we need to cancel our holiday? Holiday insurance will ensure we don’t lose all that we paid out.

Where we have an existing travel insurance policy, we should first ensure this covers us for staying in the UK. If we don’t, cover for a singular UK trip for about ten days will only set us back about £12 (if going with a friend).

At least with travelling about the UK, us UK residents will not need to concern ourselves with medical insurance cover. We are already covered through the NHS. Friends who are residents abroad who are tagging along ought to look into medical costs though. Insurance will also protect our possessions from getting lost or stolen on holiday although in some cases our home insurance policies will cover items away from the home. For further details of this, we should check with our insurance companies. So for many reasons, we should take out travel insurance even when choosing not to holiday abroad.

Moving on to car insurance. Do you plan to share the driving with your partner or friend? Both drivers need suitable insurance to cover their portion of the driving responsibility. Drivers towing a caravan need to look into their insurance with their provider as this can make a difference too.

Contents Insurance – It’s Easy To Be Underinsured

Wednesday, January 30th, 2008

An interesting piece in yesterday’s Telegraph talking about how easy it is forget that the contents of our houses increases over time. They’re reporting that it’s not unusual for claims adjusters to reduce a claim by as much as 50% simply because the contents of the house were underinsured. They state that “Figures published by Abbey last year show that 257,000 of all home insurance policies, across both building and contents cover, were declined as a result of underinsurance.” I can’t believe that the claims were totally disallowed, the normal procedure is to reduce the claim by the percentage of under valuation. Thus if I take out that provides cover for £30,000 and the insurance assessor value the contents of the house at £60,000 then you should only expect to be paid half of the amount that you claim.

The article also points out that there is a wide difference in the blanket cover (i.e. the contents not individually valued and listed) offered by the leading insurance companies. Direct Line’s basic policy offers £15,000 of unspecified item cover whereas More Than has the limit set at £75,000. Once more it’s telling us that we should research all insurance cover before making a final choice. Product loyalty is often misplaced, one company could have the best value car insurance whereas their home insurance sucks…always take a few minutes to do some research. You’ll find a wide choice of insurers on the home insurance pages of the website.