Any good Alternative to British Gas Homecare

HappySad

Do you know if any good alternative to British Gas Homecare? Been let down yet again. My husband said their engineers are all being sacked and being rehires under new contracts. I’m not sure what other company to look to instead because they all look like cowboys to be. Do you have a local setup? How does that work. With British Gas they have a heap of engineers available all the time to call out for all house issues plus app parts & labour covered. What alternative setup do you have?

grumbler

Do you really have a lot of 'house issues' and often need to call?

During 20 years only twice I needed  to call for a gas engineer to fix small problems with my boiler. Admittedly, it wasn't easy to find one near Christmas, but I have no regrets for not paying for any insurance all this time.

ashe

grumbler said:

Do you really have a lot of 'house issues' and often need to call?

During 20 years only twice I needed  to call for a gas engineer to fix small problems with my boiler. Admittedly, it wasn't easy to find one near Christmas, but I have no regrets for not paying for any insurance all this time.

We've lived in our fairly modern home for 2 years and we've had 2 instances of boiler breakdown, both in winter, both times was sorted out within 24h at no cost to ourselves.

to the OP: check your home insurance if it includes home emergency cover - ours does and it doesn't impact your premiums.

fenwick458

yeah heres an alternative, save some money every month by not paying for one of these insurance scams, put that money in a pot every month, and then when something goes wrong you ring a local tradesman and get them to fix it, taking the money from the pot.

grumbler

ashe said:

check your home insurance if it includes home emergency cover - ours does and it doesn't impact your premiums.

It almost certainly does - if you shop around every year. I do - and I didn't ever have it included for free.

ashe

grumbler said:

ashe said:

check your home insurance if it includes home emergency cover - ours does and it doesn't impact your premiums.

It almost certainly does - if you shop around every year. I do - and I didn't ever have it included for free.

You misunderstand, I mean claiming on the policy doesn’t affect your premiums in terms of declaring you’ve made a home insurance claim as you haven’t; it’s a separate policy 

Ectophile

I have a savings account, and a good local plumber.  It has the advantage that if the boiler doesn't go wrong in any year, I get to keep the money!

ashe

Ectophile said:

I have a savings account, and a good local plumber.  It has the advantage that if the boiler doesn't go wrong in any year, I get to keep the money!

& the disadvantage that for the sake of about £30-£50 a year, if something does go wrong then you have to fork out a few hundred / thousand. Your local plumber will be set though. 

grumbler

ashe said:

Ectophile said:

I have a savings account, and a good local plumber.  It has the advantage that if the boiler doesn't go wrong in any year, I get to keep the money!

& the disadvantage that for the sake of about £30-£50 a year, if something does go wrong then you have to fork out a few hundred / thousand. Your local plumber will be set though. 

Well, if you save money by paying for the insurance, how does the insurer make money then? Are their subcontractors really cheaper than your local plumber?

ETA: With all insurances without NCD system in place customers with rare claims heavily subsidise those who make many of them and only the latter really benefit from the insurance. That was why I asked the OP whether they had "a lot of 'house issues' ".

bowlhead99

grumbler said:

ashe said:

Ectophile said:

I have a savings account, and a good local plumber.  It has the advantage that if the boiler doesn't go wrong in any year, I get to keep the money!

& the disadvantage that for the sake of about £30-£50 a year, if something does go wrong then you have to fork out a few hundred / thousand. Your local plumber will be set though. 

Well, if you save money by paying for the insurance, how does the insurer make money then? Are their subcontractors really cheaper than your local plumber?

ETA: With all insurances without NCD system in place customers with rare claims heavily subsidise those who make many of them and only the latter really benefit from the insurance. That was why I asked the OP whether they had "a lot of 'house issues' ".

Overall the way to 'win' with insurance is to buy insurance for disaster and then be unfortunate enough to actually have a really bad disaster, making a profit out of your policy with the insurance company when they pay you more than you pay them over a lifetime of premiums. As insurance companies generally still make profits over time , what's really happening is you are making money out of the other policy holders - who paid fat premiums to cover themselves for more costs than actually transpired for those other customers

But what those other customers are paying for - when they pay the money to the insurer, who collects it together and pays it to you, the person with the high claim - is one part financial compensation (like a savings or investment plan to pay for the remedies needed when disaster strikes) and one part peace of mind (knowing you will get the cashflow to cover the disaster even if you hadn't been saving up enough years to build your pot of money, or have two bad years in a row etc). So it can be quite rational to buy insurance even though you hope and expect not to actually 'profit'.

As an example of a random insurance company, you can see from the financial reports that Direct Line give to their investors, that the level of claims is always expected to be quite a bit lower than the level of premiums received, and also while they are sitting on your money in the time between you paying a premium and getting a claim they will be investing it in stuff (bonds, property, cash accounts etc). Averaged over all their lines of business they target an 'operating ratio' of about 93-95%; e.g. for £100 of net earned premium they may have £60 of claims, allowing them to spend £5-10 on commissions and £25p on operating expenses and still have all those components of operating costs be lower than the £100 the customers pay.  So in that example the customer is paying £100, missing out on being able to save or invest that money for some income over the course of the year, and then claiming for £60 of loss. 

- If you're a wealthy 'money saving expert' and are not more unlucky than the average punter, you can probably afford to self-insure and just put the premiums into your savings account or investment ISA and hope to call on it once or twice per decade or two. Even if you're mathematically right to do that, you might still wince at a run of uninsured costs, but people might call you smart for managing your own risk.

-If you're not a very wealthy 'money saving expert' you may not necessarily have the cashflow to get you through a disaster if it happens in the next few years;  people wouldn't think you much of an 'expert' if you had the opportunity to pay a few pounds a month to cover a disaster and thought you would be bold and not buy the insurance and guessed wrong - they may say, told you so. 

Unfortunately it's one of those things where people with relatively less money don't want to pay the premiums but feel they "can't afford not to..."; while the more wealthy become wealthier over time by not paying insurance companies a 'premium' to the likely value of their lifetime claims.  It doesn't make the insurance offering a 'scam', just a product that might be more suitable for some than for others.

grumbler

Well, £100 and £60 figures speak for themselves - even ignoring the point that one category of customers subsidies another.