Just saved £30 by lowering my excess!!!! Woo hoo!!!

kwmlondon

I got an excellent price for renewing my buildings and contents insurance with my insurer (Bradford and Bingley). Did a check with comparison websites and they were coming in at about £225 whereas the renewal quote was £183 - all good. I called Bradford and Bingley to give a new card number to pay and asked how much it would cost to lower the excess from £350 expecting the premium to shoot up - it went down to just under £150!!!!! Even the guy in the call centre was astonished! I'm not sure how this applies as a money-saving tip, but people - check quotes by raising AND lowering excess as it may save you £££s!!!!

InsideInsurance

Like many things, there is a sweet spot on excess, mileage for cars etc and the extremes are very rarely where they are.

Its more common with Car insurance but those that tend to put their excess up to £1,000 etc are those bad risks that have realised that Comp is cheaper than TPFT. As such they have more claims and so insurers when analyzing their books see that they end up paying out more for these policyholders despite the higher excess hence the premiums reflect this.

kwmlondon

Yeah, thanks - good point and worth sharing. I had to make two claims in one year and one was pretty huge (put my ancient Omega through the washing machine and they decided to reimburse me £2k, then I got knocked off my bicycle and had to claim £750 for that) so I got a bump in premiums and I got a big excess, brilliant that it's come down now but what's astonishing is that it's with the same insurer and exactly the same underwriter - just cheaper! Happy days eh?

hertsdebt

Well done kwmlondon. I recently done the same when l renewed my car insurance, went on comparison site Compare With Us and it come back with about 30 odd quotes, increased my excess and the quote went DOWN by over £25.00. Result