Rant: Why is Car Insurance so expensive and forms so intrusive these days?

LiveOnce

Well one question they ask is if I am a Home Owner or not.

And I agree, maybe my age does make a difference but 8 years of driving and I have not had one accident or made a claim.

Mercdriver

LiveOnce wrote: »

Well one question they ask is if I am a Home Owner or not.

And I agree, maybe my age does make a difference but 8 years of driving and I have not had one accident or made a claim.

I suspect this is part of the risk assessment algorithm on their computers. There's probably a different risk pattern for a tenant than for a homeowner.

BeenThroughItAll

LiveOnce wrote: »

Well one question they ask is if I am a Home Owner or not.

And I agree, maybe my age does make a difference but 8 years of driving and I have not had one accident or made a claim.

My God, how intrusive.

LiveOnce

Exactly.

It's a combination of both of your replies. They use it for marketing as well as some form of analysis I think.

GTE_Boy

LiveOnce wrote: »

Exactly.

It's a combination of both of your replies. They use it for marketing as well as some form of analysis I think.

They just want to sell you household insurance too. God forbid they ask about your pets.

LiveOnce

That's a distraction.

I feel the insurance premiums are way too high.

It seems to me they are price fixing and these comparison websites are nothing but a monopoly for them.

waamo

The meerkats don't ask me anything intrusive. I pay less than £300 fully comp with business travel on. It also covers driving other vehicles too. I don't think that's too bad.

Strider590

https://yiu.co.uk/blog/who-can-view-my-internet-history/

And your worried about the questions asked by insurance companies???

forgotmyname

LiveOnce wrote: »

That's a distraction.

I feel the insurance premiums are way too high.

It seems to me they are price fixing and these comparison websites are nothing but a monopoly for them.

If your insurance is too high get a car thats cheaper to insure and move to a cheaper area.

Parents moved to the seaside and saved quite a bit of money, BIL moved to the middle of nowhere and expecting to get a bill for admin charges but actually got a refund.

Aretnap

Joe_Horner wrote: »

You'll very often find that a quote for "now" is a lot higher than one for a couple of weeks in the future, even from the same company. I assume it's because they know you need it so are less inclined to be competitive at short notice.

I don't doubt that's part of it - the same reason why you get a better deal on flights and train tickets if you book weeks in advance than you do if you just turn up at the airport/station.

But someone in a position to know said on another board that many insurers also use it as a rating criterion in its own right - they have different claims experiences for immediate cover than they do for people who arrange cover well in advance. Which sort of makes sense - off the top of my head I can think of at least three reasons why that might be the case...

(1) Fraud risk. If you are uninsured and you have an accident, or your car catches fire, there must be a strong temptation to arrange some cover for immediate start, then phone up the insurer fifteen minutes later and say "you'll never guess what's just happened..." Depending on the circumstances, it won't always be easy for the insurer to prove that your claim is fraudulent. I was sorely tempted to do something similar when my car wouldn't start one morning and I realised that my breakdown cover had lapsed. In the end I was too honest (or maybe scared of being caught), but not everyone is...

(2) General attitude to paperwork. If you're the sort of person who doesn't get round to sorting out your renewal until the day it's due (or worse still, the day after it's due) then there's a fair chance that you'll also be the sort of person who takes three days to tell your insurer when you've had an accident, or to return their calls when they try to ask you about the accident. And there's little insurers hate more than customers who don't inform them of accidents promptly. It means when you drive into the back of someone they miss out on the chance to keep their costs down by contacting the third party and offering to arrange his repairs/hire car themselves, and the first thing they know about the accident is when they get a massively inflated bill from a credit hire company.

(3) General personality types - if you arrange your car insurance a month before it's due you're probably a fairly forward thinking, organised person, and maybe that feeds through into other aspects of your behaviour, like your driving style.

So it pays to get your insurance sorted out in advance.