Pruhealth gym loophole Article Discussion

karie

got an interesting letter from pruhealth today reiterating their changes to terms and conditions as from nov 1st, giving the option to stay on existing gym set-up until renewal or change to new set-up. they seem to be offering £30 if you change to new set-up. Quite nice of them i think!

i havent complained or anything so i presume this is some sort of standard letter they are sending out (apologies if this has already been mentioned)

karie

olic

I am planning on going to LA Fitness.

Bargain_Rzl

olic, that doesn't really help - you need to say which branch of LA Fitness, and whether that's the only branch you want ot be able to use, as it all makes a difference to the fee structure.

karie, I suspect the letter you got has probably been sent to all members whose renewal date falls into a certain date range. I haven't had one - but then, my renewal date was two days ago, and I can't imagine that they'd want anybody remaining on the old price structure 11 months into the new system! The new system works out to my advantage anyway (and what with 10% of points carried forward, plus doing all the meal plans, reviews, NS declaration, articles and stress questionnaires, I'm already on 590 points ) Yesterday, being the last day of the month, was the last day I needed to worry about whether I'd been to the gym enough during the quarter. Hurrah!

olic

Oh OK, sorry... I just want to use the woking branch of LA.Fitness, no others.

Bargain_Rzl

OK.

I'm not sure how you figured out that you can get to Platinum in 3 months, because as far as I can see, it takes just over 6 months minimum, unless you want to start paying for screenings and so on, to get additional points.

You will have a one-off setup fee of £25 to join the gym. You will then pay your gym fees a month in arrears, i.e. if you join at the beginning of November you'll pay your first monthly gym fee at the beginning of December. I think this means that if you go up a Vitality level in November (say from Bronze to Silver), your fee at the end of November would be the Bronze one, because at the start of that month you were Bronze. Somebody will correct me on this if I'm wrong.

Woking's just outside the M25, right? Monthly fees at Woking LA Fitness are therefore £42, £30, £14 and £0 depending on Vitality status.

Let's say you join Pruhealth and the gym at the start of November. If you get all your "free" yearly or half yearly Vitality points (non smoker declaration 150, Vitality review 100, meal plan 50, stress assessment 50) plus you register online (50) go for a Fitness Assessment (300) read your three articles for the month (30) and max out your gym points (150), you'll be on 880 points by the end of November. You need 1000 to progress to Silver, which you can do in December by going to the gym and reading three more articles (a max of 180 available points in total) and you would end up with 1060 points. The next four months will be the same, i.e. the maximum number of easy free points is 180 per month (gym + articles) so the earliest you are likely to reach Gold will be sometime in February. Once you hit the seventh month (May in this example) it is immediately dead easy to reach Platinum because you then qualify to do all your half-yearly activities again - you could accelerate this process by paying for a screening, but then you'd need to factor this into your costs.

Assuming you don't accelerate this (and for simplification's sake I've ignored the "personal goals" points available) I make it as follows:

Start Nov: £25 setup fee plus November's premium
Start Dec: November gym fee £42 + December's premium
Start Jan: December gym fee £42 + January's premium
Start Feb: January gym fee £30 + February's premium
Start Mar: February gym fee £30 + March's premium
Start Apr: March gym fee £14 + April's premium
Start May: April gym fee £14 + May's premium
Start Jun: May gym fee £0 + June's premium
July to November: as June.
Next year: Gym fees £0 and vastly reduced premium!

Does this look right to others?

olic

Cheers Rzl! thats extremely useful!

I think I'm going to go ahead and sign-up.

I just need to know two more things

- What is the soonest date I will be able to get my Gym pass if I was to sign up today.

- I don't want any free checks, so it's best to sign up through Pruhealth rather than boots, but how much cashback can I get and is Quidco the best site to go through?

miaggi

OMD just about to get all indignant at getting a renewal quote through of £43.08 after last years being £16/month and me getting to platinum when I realised the renewal price quoted wasn't the monthly cost but the annual cost.

Monthly health insurance including free gym membership cost = £3.79!!!

This is so worth doing if anyone is still having doubts about it, the new system means that the first 6 months might be a bit pricey but if you plan what you need to do you should be able to get to platinum in that time (or at the least gold) and the second 6 should be loads less. By the second year you'll be doing what I am currently doing and giggling to yourself in unbounded joy at how absurdly cheap this works out to be.

Now all I need to do is work on a new plan for next year to make sure I hit platinum again - shouldn't be too difficult me thinks.

Tre-beam

Hi everyone,
I'm thinking of joining a Virgin Active, tier 2, in November and the full membership price they have given me is £62.95 + £30.00 joining fee.

With Pru Health, the insurance premium would be £37.00 and gym fees £57 (on Bronze). I am trying to work out which one would be best overall but keep getting my calculations all wrong. I know that initially I would be paying out a fair bit more with Pru Health but not sure if this would even out?

Can anyone help please?

TIA,

TB

lulu650

Bargain_Rzl wrote: »

.....I'm not sure how you figured out that you can get to Platinum in 3 months, because as far as I can see, it takes just over 6 months minimum, unless you want to start paying for screenings and so on, to get additional points.....

Well, for me, it took exactly 3 months and I didn't go to the gym 15 times per month. I did all the usual stuff mentioned earlier.

I joined through Boots, so free eye and glaucoma test = 175 points
Boots free Health check and I asked them to include the glucose testing = 500 points
A slight glitch on the ebay sporting goods credited me with 120 points
Pap smear (the advantage of being old!) = 150
There are various goals to reach on the new website, only reached 1 so far but 36 days before I needed to, gave me an unexpected 50 points

I actually reach platinum before the breast screening I'd booked for and the flu injection which my firm are paying for anyway.

Feel quite smug now :T

PMISpecialist_2

luckyfool wrote: »

Crazy . . . I reached Platinum status with about 3 months to spare in my first year so my renewal premium was about £2.40 a month.

However I have now confirmed platinum status for my third policy year only 2 months into my 2nd year. I'm assuming there was a bug or error at Pruhealths end as they gave me around 1200 vitality points for a fitness assessment. 300 for the actual assessment, some points for improving BMI band, and maintaining Blood Pressure, but they also gave me 900 points for improving 3 fitness bands. Now I havent read the small print but I had assumed that you should only get credit for improving 1 fitness band at a time, so a maximum of 300 points for this in any one assessment.

But hey . . . I'm not complaining! I don't need to go to the gym or worry about points for the next 10 months and I'm guaranteed gym and health insurance for about £3 a month for the next 2 years. I'm also going to look at Pruprotect Life Cover (extra discounts available if you have both) and looking forward to my cineworld card for £15.

I joined Pruprotect a couple of months ago and as i sell Pruhealth and Pruprotect products (among many others) get all the commission back, i'm 32 and in my case i'm paying £35.11 for £100,000 Life AND Critical Illness cover (Life cover was very cheap about £12 ish on its own), as long as i get to platinum every year my premiums go down 2.5% (compounded).
So cost of living goes up but my Pru premiums come down. By year 5 i'm paying £32.06, year 10 £28.61, year 20 £22.79, year 25 £20.33 They cover more than most life/CI insurers too and are good at paying out.

I got around £700 back (comission is 130% of year one's premium) so it basically pays for itself for the first two years. Plus the extra discounts like you say. If you wanted to split the commission and/or know more information email me: [EMAIL="marcnicol@pch.uk.com"]marcnicol@pch.uk.com[/EMAIL]