Swapping no claims bonus

fairyelephant18

I am trying to help friends with car insurance.  Husband always insured car in his name and had built up NCB ( No Claims Bonus).  Wife was always names driver.
Husband has had to relinquish his licence (end of life situation) and so needs to know if swapping NCB is only available through original insurers.  They have given an extortionate quote for wife and so I feel she should be able to move to another insurer but unsure re: NCB

pramsay13

The no claims bonus is for the person so it cannot be swapped. Some insurers offer to allow named drivers to build up no claims but it is more a marketing gimmick rather than a useful policy. 

FlorayG

You can't award your NCB to another person because it's your personal record, not your car's

DullGreyGuy

fairyelephant18 said:

I am trying to help friends with car insurance.  Husband always insured car in his name and had built up NCB ( No Claims Bonus).  Wife was always names driver.
Husband has had to relinquish his licence (end of life situation) and so needs to know if swapping NCB is only available through original insurers.  They have given an extortionate quote for wife and so I feel she should be able to move to another insurer but unsure re: NCB

Generally NCD is personal and named drivers etc dont accrue any. That said, many insurers are compassionate and may consider switching the NCD in certain circumstances like your friends or upon the death of a spouse etc but they arent obliged to. 

There are two sellers of insurance willing to mirror NCD from spouses google the term and you'll find them high in the results. 

Will the current insurers allow him to continue to be the policyholder with her marked as the main driver? Some insurers are happy with the arrangement. 

Ultimately it would be the case of hitting the phones and seeing if anyone is willing to help but do also get a quote on confused.com etc with 0 NCD and its probably not as bad as you may think, certainly some people find their 20 years NCD is only worth a £5 discount whereas some insurers still do the traditional 70% discount but give an introductory 20-30% discount to anyone who is otherwise a good risk by default 

CliveOfIndia

pramsay13 said:

The no claims bonus is for the person so it cannot be swapped. Some insurers offer to allow named drivers to build up no claims but it is more a marketing gimmick rather than a useful policy. 

This.  Some insurers will give you some discount based upon being claims-free as a named driver.  It's not offered by all companies, and is usually less than the "full" discount you'd have earned if you were the policy-holder - but it's better than nothing.

Also, remember that the whole NCD thing has no legal standing.  It's offered by most - if not all - insurers, almost as a marketing ploy, but they're not legally obliged to offer it at all.

fairyelephant18 said:

They have given an extortionate quote for wife and so I feel she should be able to move to another insurer but unsure re: NCB

It's definitely worth shopping around.  Even if she has to declare zero NCD, it's quite possible to find another company can be significantly cheaper.  Although, do check you're comparing like with like, and check that the policy actually covers everything she needs.  There are so many different levels of cover and optional extras, combined with different compulsory and voluntary excess amounts, it can sometimes be quite tricky to find one policy that's exactly the same as another.

fairyelephant18

@DullGreyGuy
Thank you for your help (this extends to all responses)
Having looked at husband’s policy docs, the amount he was paying was very high when compared against other companies even using like for like.  I think he has just used the same company for years and renewed each year
We have found a few favourable quotes for what my friend needs even without NCB and have almost halved previous costs
Once again, thank you all 

CliveOfIndia

That's good to hear.  And yes, people often get very hung up on NCD, but it's just a relatively small component of the whole equation.

When I was young, there was no such thing as the Internet (yes, I used to drive a Flintstone-mobile).  Shopping around for insurance meant setting aside a couple of hours to phone dozens of different companies to get the best quote - but I still used to do that, and more often than not ended up making quite a reasonable saving.

These days it's so simple to shop around, you'd be daft not to.  And do it every year - loyalty counts for nothing in the insurance game.

sheslookinhot

fairyelephant18 said:

@DullGreyGuy
Thank you for your help (this extends to all responses)
Having looked at husband’s policy docs, the amount he was paying was very high when compared against other companies even using like for like.  I think he has just used the same company for years and renewed each year
We have found a few favourable quotes for what my friend needs even without NCB and have almost halved previous costs
Once again, thank you all 

Worthwhile suggesting she checks home insurance, and utility costs. There might be a saving here too.

Goudy

CliveOfIndia said:

When I was young, there was no such thing as the Internet (yes, I used to drive a Flintstone-mobile).  Shopping around for insurance meant setting aside a couple of hours to phone dozens of different companies to get the best quote 

When I started driving you went to a shop to buy your car insurance. (and your red flag!)

There were a few that you could ring up, but they were usually shop based brokers with a couple of telephone lines, not big call centres with access to every underwriter.
Swinton had a chain of shops and other insurance brokers set up in shops where you trudged around to get the best quote.

The Co-op (CIS) was another biggy in my area.
You could phone them or it was sometimes possible to arrange it with the "insurance man".
A rep that went door to door selling all sorts of insurance policies and collecting premiums, often with a weekly or monthly knock on the door.

My sister lives in Greece and you can buy it from the bank.

DullGreyGuy

Goudy said:
My sister lives in Greece and you can buy it from the bank.

When RBS still owned Direct Line Group you used to be able to buy it from the bank too but all they were doing were going onto the normal website and doing a quote. They then realised this meant they were putting through a card payment in a Cardholder Not Present system when the cardholder was indeed present which is a breach of scheme rules. 

If your licensed to sell banking products you can normally do non-advised insurance sales too, unfortunately the inverse isnt true. There were a few discussions on how the two halves of the business could be tied up so that if someone calls wanting a quote on a car they were looking to buy or to phone up to apply for a loan to buy a car they could try and cross sell finance/insurance but it would be onerous for the insurance call centre and the bank wasnt interested in the commissions from insurance.

fairyelephant18

We’ve cut the quote by more than 50% which is brilliant!

@sheslookinhot I’m leaving other insurances etc for now as there is so much going on and we’re doing our best to keep everything as ‘normal’ as possible.  Just needed to get my friend back on the road 
Apologies for not ‘adding’ or ‘tagging’ properly, I still need to work out how to do things like that on here