Cheaper Car Insurance

Yesterday the renewal notice for my wife’s car dropped into the mailbox. A 30% increase on last year’s quote! Naturally I started looking for cheaper car insurance.

Usually this takes me the best part of a day. I have to find all the latest offers, enter my wife’s details into all the little boxes, plus mine as co-driver of course. Then compile a spreadsheet with all the quotes and associated excess.

It’s not fun.

But this year I decided to give multi-quote agencies a try. In the UK I found

www.confused.com

gave me a spreadsheet of results right off the block.

In the USA

www.netquote.com

does much the same thing.

So how do these systems work and why does car insurance vary so much?

Well these multi-insurance agencies work with a huge variety of insurers to get the best possible quote to suit your particular circumstances.

You see, each year, insurance companies decide to chase people in particular categories. They do this in order to spread their risk.

For example take a car insurance company which has a predominance of young drivers on its books. Young drivers are high risk, right? And the payouts are considerable. So, to offset that, the insurance company would want to attract older car owners too, especially those with a large number of years without making a claim.

So what they do is lower their rates for that type of buyer, maybe only for six or twelve months, just until they’ve redressed the balance between young, high risk and older, low risk drivers.

That’s why my wife’s insurance came in 30% higher this year. Last year, when I got a quote, I struck lucky and found an insurer who wanted drivers like us on their books. So they had a lower price to attract us.

Now they’ve got all the older drivers they want they’ve put the price back up again. Hence the higher quote.

That’s why it pays to shop around.

But insurance companies know that not everybody has the time, or the inclination, to keep shopping for alternative quotes. So a lot of drivers just tick the renew invitation and go.

This is where confused.com and netquote.com come into their own. Enter your details once and you can make a quick comparison of quotes and value.

Cheaper car insurance? It’s so simple you’ll wonder why you hadn’t tried it before!

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