Tips to Get a Better Price on Your Insurance
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Car insurance is an extremely competitive market, which automatically means good news for the consumer, since with a little bit of effort you can easily shave a good chunk of money off your insurance premiums. Here’s how to do it:
Always make sure that you start shopping around for your insurance a couple of weeks before it’s due. If you leave it until the last possible minute then you’re under pressure to sort it out quickly, which doesn’t help.
Think carefully about what level of insurance you need. Do you really need fully comprehensive insurance, replacement vehicle cover, or foreign country cover? By removing unnecessary elements you can immediately shave money off the quote. Also play around with different excess amounts - the higher the excess, the lower the quote will be.
One of the major costs of car insurance is how big a risk the insurance company percieves you to be, so it makes absolute sense to make yourself as low a risk as possible. This means making sure that your car is kept as secure as possible overnight, that you have security fitted, that you give an accurate indication of the mileage that you do, and that you are careful about the job description that you give.
Insurance companies keep records of the number of accidents that occur within different employment types, so by just amending your title slightly you can save on your premiums. This doesn’t mean lying to the insurance company, but for example, sales executives may be quite a high risk because they spend a lot of time driving and cover a lot of mileage. If you are a sales person based in an office and you travel a half a mile to work each day you don’t want to end up grouped with your higher risk counterparts - so think carefully about how you describe your job!
Next, start by using an online car insurance comparison website. These sites submit your details to dozens of insurers automatically and bring back the insurance quotes from each. It’s amazing that although these websites are incredibly easy to use, a lot of people simply go to their current insurers, get a quote, and then take the insurance - Don’t do this!
Once that you have your quotes from the car insurance comparison site be sure to look through them carefully and make sure that you’re comparing apples with apples - this means look at the excess charge (deductables), the different benefits like replacement vehicles while yours is being repaired, etc. Only pay for things that you will realistically need.
If necessary resubmit your details with amendments to the level of cover, and then check through the quotes as above.
Once you have your best quote the fun begins! There are a couple of excellent ways to really save some money!
First of all you should go and check the cashback websites that are out there. These are sites where you can register and when you buy a product through that site you get money credited to your account. A lot of insurance groups offer their car insurance products on these sites, and they offer a hefty chunk of money - up to £150 (around $250) if you sign up online through the cashback site - so you need to look through them to see if any of the insurance companies from your top few quotes are listed.
If you find any of the companies that provided the best quotes listed, then recalculate how much your insurance will cost with the cashback amount deducted.
Once you have done this, and whether any of the insurance companies were listed or not, then you should ring your own insurer, and each of the best 3 or 4 quotes that you have from the previous steps, and negotiate with them. Tell them the lowest priced quote that you have already and the level of cover and ask them to beat it.
The insurance industry is so competitive that they will almost certainly come back to you with a better price, especially your existing insurer, since they do not want to lose existing customers.
Repeat this step for as long as you feel comfortable, playing each insurer off against each other to get a better quote.
This simple method will help most people to save at least 20% on their car insurance, with some people being able to save significantly more than that.
Remember that insurance companies are desperate for your business, that there is always room for haggling with the first prices that they quote you, and that you are almost certainly overpaying at the moment!
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The Shocking Truth about Insurance Comparison Websites
Understand the shocking truth about insurance comparison sites and you may well save yourself a LOT of Money!
Just about everyone must have seen the insurance comparison websites advertised on tv, in magazines, newspapers, and just about everywhere else that you look, and on the face of it they seem like a great idea.
You simply enter your details, it checks lots of insurance companies, and shows you the best deal right there on your computer screen. You don’t need to spend time shopping around, making phone calls, or filling in forms - what could be easier, right?
Well unfortunately that’s wrong according to a web designer friend of ours who has been working on one of the insurance comparison websites.
The truth behind how these sites really work might well shock you and will almost certainly save you a lot of money…..
First of all it might help if you understand an old marketing trick that was developed to trick shoppers into buying a product from a particular company.
Years ago there were 2 main brands of washing powder competing with each other for business, when you went shopping they were the only 2 brands on the shelf.
You could say in essence that there was a 50/50 chance whether shoppers would buy Brand A or Brand B, and of course once the shopper had made up their mind about which they liked best, they wouldn’t swap to the other brand come hell or high water.
So one of the brands came up with an ingenious plan.
They created 3 new brands (Brand C, Brand D, & Brand E) and started advertising them as new products, but without any association to their existing Brand A, or to their parent company.
To the shopper it now looked like they had 5 washing powders to choose from, all from different companies, and all with different benefits and appealing features - but in reality only one company owns brands A, C, D, & E and now has 4 times more chance of being chosen by the shopper than before.
Obviously this is a huge market advantage for them, and a huge disadvantage for Brand B, who now only have a 20% chance of picking up the shoppers business.
They could also tempt shoppers by making one of their brands cheaper one month, putting one on special offer the next month, etc.
So what does this have to do with insurance comparison websites?
Well, we’re told that insurance comparison sites are simply an online version of this old trick - except much worse!
What you have is 2 to 3 main insurance groups on the comparison site along with the 10, 20, 30 or more smaller subsidiary insurance companies that they also own.
All that they do is decide which of their companies will offer the best deals each month, amend the pricing appropriately, and hey presto, when you ask for a quote you are presented with a quote that ultimately belongs to the main insurance group.
You get a requote the following month and now you can get a slightly better price from a different company - great!
However, you are still getting your insurance from the same insurance group - the only thing that has changed is the name!
So what?
Well, what it means is that you are really only getting quotes from a small number of insurers - you are not getting quotes from a huge part of the market, which means that you are almost certainly overpaying for your insurance!
If we believe that the site is comparing insurance across ALL insurance companies, or even across most insurers, then we won’t even bother to have a look and see whether there is a better deal elsewhere - we just trust that the site has done it for us, when in truth it hasn’t - it has presented us with a false choice!
What we recommend that you do if you get a quote from a comparison site is to also get quotes from at least another 3 companies using our tips to get a better price on your insurance.
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We’d be very interested indeed to hear back from our visitors and see how much money they save by taking the simple step suggested above!
