House insurance renewal coming up: Saga?

Blue_Parrot

We've lived here 16 years. House insurance due for renewal next month. Have always used Abbey for house insurance (inertia) but their price goes up every year despite our never having made a claim.

Have had unsolicited phone calls from aggressive insurance salesmen recently, from companies I have never heard of. No idea how they know the policy is due for renewal. Can only assume that policy renewal date is available to all insurance brokers/salesmen somehow.

Using information from this site, have now carefully checked other companies and narrowed search down to two.

Abbey were charging £331 p.a. this is likely to go up to over £350 on past experience.

1. Direct Line offer £232 for unlimited building sum insured, £100 excess, include accidental damage, legal, home emergency, travel and bikes.

2. Saga offer £178 for £500,000 building sum insured, £100 excess, including £59 for Domestic Emergency Cover.

On the face of it, Saga's the better offer. Don't need travel cover, that's a separate annual policy. Don't need contents insurance, that's a separate annual policy with different renewal date. This house is extremely unlikely to cost more than half a mil to rebuild, heaven forfend.

Should I now get bogged down with reading Direct Line and Saga Terms and Conditions, or just go for the Saga quotation because it nearly halves the price?

Anyone with any experience of Saga Home Insurance? Before I commit and/or phone Abbey to say "can you beat this?" (I know that's not going to happen, but this site recommended this tactic.)

(Have searched these forums but cannot find any reviews of Saga Insurance.)

*Scarlett

You could have a look at the Defacqto site. It will allow you to compare levels of cover, excess, features of cover between companies. It also gives a star rating for the policy so may help you to make your decision.

http://www.defaqto.com/insurance/home-insurance

You are probably paying too much for your Abbey policy (and possibly have been for a few years) as all insurance companies, not just Abbey, will rely on customer inertia, loyalty, etc to be able to charge more. They might offer to match your best quote (but that shows how much they were prepared to overcharge you!)

Have you got these prices from comparison sites? If not I would suggest getting a few more quotes to make sure you are getting the best deal.

On the face of it the Saga offer seems good but if you have obtained this quote online and you are not familiar with doing this, I would ring them to confirm the details so that they can answer any questions for you regarding the cover.

I'm assuming that you're looking for an over 50's specialist as you have looked at Saga - not all companies are on the comparison websites - you could "google" for over 50's for more options.

Hope this helps.

Blue_Parrot

*Scarlett wrote: »

You could have a look at the Defacqto site. It will allow you to compare levels of cover, excess, features of cover between companies. It also gives a star rating for the policy so may help you to make your decision.

http://www.defaqto.com/insurance/home-insurance

You are probably paying too much for your Abbey policy (and possibly have been for a few years) as all insurance companies, not just Abbey, will rely on customer inertia, loyalty, etc to be able to charge more. They might offer to match your best quote (but that shows how much they were prepared to overcharge you!)

Have you got these prices from comparison sites? If not I would suggest getting a few more quotes to make sure you are getting the best deal.

On the face of it the Saga offer seems good but if you have obtained this quote online and you are not familiar with doing this, I would ring them to confirm the details so that they can answer any questions for you regarding the cover.

I'm assuming that you're looking for an over 50's specialist as you have looked at Saga - not all companies are on the comparison websites - you could "google" for over 50's for more options.

Hope this helps.

Very many thanks for this, I have now spent another couple of hours on research. You need patience, determination and a sense of humour researching home insurance policies, because it seems a mad, crazy, over-supplied market out there.

I started with gocompare and selected 4 quotes. Then supplying exactly the same information (of course) I tried comparethemarket.

Three out of the four I'd picked off gocompare didn't even come up on comparethemarket's results. For fourth one came up at £10 less. Both of them said Saga could not quote and I soon found out why, when re-supplying details to Saga's website again.....

More interestingly, apart from that blizzard of information, is this: as an experiment I went on to Abbey now known as Santander's website directly. They have insured this house for 16 years and are likely to charge ~£350 for renewal this year when they get around to sending me the documents.

Keying in the data on a house they already insure, swiftly yielded a quote of £208.69. How mad is that? £142 difference!

I've saved the quotation and printed it out, so I guess all I have to do when they send the paperwork is to point out that an internet enquiry to them yields a £142 saving for the same people in the same property and invite their comments. I can't even begin to imagine what they will say next.

Incidentally, I found a way around keying in your phone number if you do not want them to call you: key it in with a digit missing. The software on all these sites does not realise and lets you proceed.