Insurance By Car Blog

Talking about the size of the penis can make a difference to car insurance surly not? But this phone call regarding a car insurance quote does appear to be genuine and the guy on the phone really does give the car insurance company a hard time with his challenge on statistics.

The humour is the quick responses the phone caller gives to the insurance company and how the guy at the other end seems to fall for it hook line and sinker. It is not genuine: then it is a good job of acting. So if you sell car insurance you might want to watch this to ensure you do not get sucked in to an unhappy customer who hasn’t figured out that the guy on the phone dos not make the premium prices up.

Vistit here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtEp5yc-g3A

(I’m married to her – a monstrous winged and scaly serpent with crested head and great claws – met my wife, the dragon! Yes, I love her dearly, honestly!)

Common sense doesn’t always rule in our house. Not when the dragon’s got a bee under her bonnet!

For heavens sake, who goes out spending more money when we’re in the worst recession for 25 years? Surely, now is not the time to increase the family’s expenditure. But if the dragon insists that family needs more financial protection, the family is destined to get more financial protection!

Specifically her instructions were to buy more life assurance cover which would repay our mortgage if I gave up the ghost (isn’t it nice for her to plan for that!). I also had to ensure that the family had sufficient income cover to provide £1,250 each month if I lost my admin job at John Lewis. And it didn’t finish there. The dragon also wanted mortgage insurance to pay our mortgage instalments if I lost my job.

So despite my reticence, I was distained to become a protection insurance shopper.

But I also had an agenda. Whilst I was obeying the dragon’s orders, I decided to check out health insurance. Two years ago year I had to wait seven months for an operation on my wrist, (a one handed admin man can’t work efficiently on his computer says my shift manager!). So without telling the dragon, I slipped health insurance into the shopping list.

I speculated that I’d be able to get everything through the internet. So being an efficient admin man, after the evening meal last Tuesday I sat down behind my PC. After a day behind a computer terminal at John Lewis’s, that surely makes me a glutton for punishment!

Now I’ve already got £90,000 of life assurance which my Mother persuaded me to have when I was 19 (Can anyone explain that? Why should a 19 year old with no family responsibilities, need life assurance?) However, when we bought our house I was rather dilatory in not having life assurance that was ear marked to repay our mortgage if I died. (Is the dragon acquainted with something I’m not? Possibly her reptilian powers enable her to foresee the future!) Anyway my starting point was life assurance.

My younger sister, having life assurance coming out of her ear holes, knowingly advised me to use a broker – she knows everything, or thinks she does! So on opening MSN Live, I ignored the web sites published by the big insurers such as Friends Provident, Royal Liver, Bupa, Legal & General until I came across a site called Brokers Online. Brokers Online sounded the right sort of name to my pea brain, but it was strange that their address was www.life-insurance-bureau.co.uk. It turned out they are part of an online co-operative with all the web sites inn the co-operative running with the Brokers Online branding. Never come across that before. Apparently, each Brokers Online site specialises in insurance and family finance generally. If my experience is anything to go by, they seem a pretty slick business.

Foe life assurance I used Brokers Online’s comparison service and within half an hour one an adviser from Click Financial phoned me up. He pointed out that since the dragon and I had a joint repayment mortgage, a Joint Decreasing Term Life Assurance policy would do the job. Click gave me three quotes and went through them with me. They seemed straight forward. In the end I went with a policy issued by an insurance company called Fortis. I hadn’t heard of them before but they were the cheapest and the adviser assured me that they were big and reputable. First job done!

Whilst their site, I saw that Brokers Online also had mortgage insurance to pay our monthly mortgage instalments. And they also had income cover. The web site explained that they worked alongside a company called British Insurance for both these types of insurance. Apparently British Insurance has received many industry and awards for their income cover and mortgage insurance plans. It took me just eleven minutes to get both insurances applied for - and they cost a lot less than I’d half expected. What’s more I wasn’t committed to either of these policies for a long time– they can be cancelled without penalty at any time. They would remain insurance remains in place as long as I continue to pay the premiums. The komodo was really impressed!

So that just left my pet concern, health insurance. A quick glance down Brokers Online’s navigation showed that they were in that market too! It turned out that health Insurance is very complicated. Brokers Online recognises this problem and provides a call back from a specialist health insurance consultant. The simple life is so much better. So I just completed some basic information online and waited for the consultant to phone back. That was a good move as left to my own devices I would most certainly have made a mistake. It was far easier to get advice from their adviser. In the end I went for a health insurance policy which covered all the family. Even provided a fire service to put out the dragon’s flames!

The entire shopping trip took me fifty five minutes online and forty five minutes on the phone. And not too painful - thanks Brokers Online!

There is no doubt about it; the heavy car insurance marketing is back. Everyone has a new improved website and of course there are the messages of getting cheaper car insurance and we all end up wondering, not every company can offer better value than everyone else, what are the insurance companies left that still sell expensive policies?
The recent heavy weather spell certainly would not have been good news for the insurance industry. Of course they plan for bad weather spells, but with the worst spell of weather in nearly 20 years and most insurance corporations associated with banks that are just about held together with tax payers’ money, the last thing they needed was to have to put their hands into their stretched piggy banks with unplanned pay outs.

The AA had claimed that roads were unnecessarily unsafe and the excess accidents were due to low levels of salt. They of course were talking about the human costs, but it is the car insurance companies that will pick up most of the financial costs. Many more roads were blocked or just too slippery to drive, but many tried anyway and accidents occurred. We bet the auto salvage auctions had a few more vehicles in this month.

Even the breakdown insurance companies found themselves extremely stretched and as many of these are owned by the car insurance companies, you can see the link.  It was predicted anyway at the beginning of the year that car insurance premiums would rise because of the current credit crisis, but you can’t help felling this weather bought and extra payouts, will take premiums even higher. Whether we will se higher breakdown insurance premiums also, we have yet to see, as it si possible that many are just choosing not to renew this year.

Ironically it was the unpopular vehicles that stole the show this week. We are talking about the 4 x 4 vehicles, that have become too expensive to drive because of fuel costs (although this has dropped now) high congestion charges and very soon high road tax charges. The only people who seemed to move last week, were those in 4×4s, we wonder if their value will start to come back.

The whole point of car insurance is to protect ourselves financially from accidents whether it be our fault or someone else’s depending if you have comprehensive or third part cover. But one way that insurance companies can keep the cost of car insurance premiums down is by dealing with the aftermath of an accident efficiently.

We are not talking about payouts here or medical care, but how they resell that damaged vehicle that probably is now has the title of a salvage car. By ensuring they get some sort of return from these insurance write offs can pump money back  into the company to protect their bottom line profits and so be able to offer cheaper motor insurance.

Take for example a typical that is insured for the value of £4000. This is then paid out as the event of an accident that repairable salvage item can then sold at special trade auctions up and down the UK. It is possible that this repairable salvage car can be sold for £1000, reducing that insurance loss by 25%. Of course every insurance write off has a different level of damage and so it is hard to gauge the direct return, but of it is averaged out over the year, it is possible that a sizable return can be made from these salvage vehicles and the level of return is based on the processes used to resell that vehicle.

However recovery costs can also be significant, so they often use third party companies to handle these salvage cars, including the sell off of these vehicles that normally happens as an online auction. Efficiency is the key to success here, as breakdown recovery, storage costs, further transport and then the fees by third party salvage yards can add up and a vehicle that had some value may now be worth less than the sum of all these services. Sometimes only effective insurance assessors can make the difference between a positive return or a negative one.

The whole point of insurance by car is to explore the different levels of insurance premiums quoted for different makes and models of cars. What you never get to know is, why there is still so much difference in insurance quotes and is it possible, that some insurance companies overcharge certain drivers so they can be competitive in pricing for their preferred type of car owner?

With many providers of breakdown cover these rules do not apply. They market a specific price for a particular breakdown cover policy of which everyone pays the same amount, not matter which make or model of car they drive. This makes it so easy for the consumer to compare what is right for them, without the need for a computer to calculate the difference.

There are some breakdown cover providers that do ask a few more questions and quote different prices depending on age and model of car and sometimes other criteria such as how many miles per year they do. One such provider is green flag, who is owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland the same company that owns Direct Line, Churchill and other car insurance organisations.

At the time of writing this, Green Flag were advertising breakdown cover or more specifically, roadside assistance from £25. It is not until you fill in their application form however that you find out if the car you drive and your driving circumstances will qualify you for the cheapest rate of £25.

Other breakdown cover organisations show you the price for each level of policy and that is it. The argument is, they can keep the price down if you show reason that the likelihood of a callout is low. However consumers like to see prices there and then, so there is also a possibility they lose customers at the point of filling in this form.
Even so, the form filling is far less labour intensive and quicker than expected with most car insurance companies, so in hindsight it’s maybe not such a bad idea.

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