Contents insurance claim

HappyMrsG

My son is abroad travelling & unfortunately lost his bag containing his camera & Ipod.
The backpackers insurance he has will only pay out £100 (max claim for valuables less excess)
I can claim on my house insurance, the excess covers the whole claim.
The insurance company say I will lose my NCD but cannot tell me how much this is but say its is usually around 10%.
So my query is whether making the claim with a value around £400 is worth it. Could there be further impact on future premiums other than loss of 10% of contents part of the policy?

InsideInsurance

Does your son live with you?

Does your policy include Personal Possessions cover? - this is an optional extra on most policies.

How much is your excess?

How did he "lose" them?

You would both lose the NCD discount and also have a loading for a recent claim.

As a rough guide to the impact, go online to your insurers site (or an aggregator like confused.com) and put in a dummy quote using a false name etc and declare no NCD and the recent claim. That will show you the approximate impact and remember it will last for 3-5 years (but the impact decrease each year assuming you have no more claims)

HappyMrsG

Thanks II. Yes my son lives with me & I am covered I have spoken to the insurer (Churchill)
I am just trying to establish the impact of claiming.

InsideInsurance

So go to the Churchill website and do the dummy quote as suggested so you can compare the price against what your paying today.

*Scarlett

You will need to declare the claim for the next 3 - 5 years (depending on the insurer).

It's not a large claim and providing that you don't need to make many more in the next couple of years you shoud still be able to get competitive quotes in the future - usually 3 or more claims within 3 years is a red flag and could lead to a decline.

As you have already made the enquiry with Churchill this will go as a loss against your policy so you might as well go ahead with the claim.

They may require local police reports, proof of ownership of items, etc

InsideInsurance

*Scarlett wrote: »

As you have already made the enquiry with Churchill this will go as a loss against your policy so you might as well go ahead with the claim.

Other than Churchill have said they cannot tell the OP what the impact will be.

Either the OP has talked to Claims in which case they know little about sales but will have given good claims advice or they have spoken the Sales in which case they will know little about pricing as it is not exposed to the general call centre staff and the claims advise they have given could well be wrong too as they aren't trained on it (but that doesnt always stop people giving advice/ trying to help)

HappyMrsG

Thanks for the advice.
I had a quick search as per advice & it doesn't seem to have much impact if I claim.