Tips for saving money on your insurance

Everyone know’s not to accept the renewal price from your current provider on your Home and Car insurance cover. After mortgages, this is the easiest area to limit your spending by seeking alternative insurers. According to the Daily Mail, On average you will save £214 by shopping around, while home insurance tumbles from £368 to £227. The internet makes it incredibly simple to find quotes, and if you don’t spend at least one lunch hour a year finding a better deal then saving money is not important.

1. Investigate your PPI
Pricey and poorly sold, Loan protection insurance is one of the most lucrative types of insurance ever devised by the finance industry. It can add £3,000 to the cost of a £7,500 secured loans. But many people were sold it who can’t possibly make a claim against it these people are able to claim their ppi back.

Lots of claims companies advertise on daytime television, promising to obtain you a refund but they will take 25% of whatever you win. Instead, call the FOS on average they are helping 80% of those missold . Helpfully, it offers a factsheet on how to make a complaint about PPI which you can find at financialombudsman.org.uk

2. Cancel your mobile phone insurance
Many people are strongly pressured in phone shops into spending between £60 and £70 a year on this kind of insurance. But the benefits are minimal: most won’t cover you for the only major risk, airtime abuse (if the phone is used to ring abroad), and you can claim for a lost phone on you contents cover.

Mobile phone insurance is easy to cancel just stop the direct debit.

3. Rethink your life insurance
Life insurance is not for life. Just because the life insurance cover was sold to you by the provider of your mortgage you don’t need to to stick with that provider for the life of the remortgage. the policy can be canceled at any time and find a better deal. With the avergae age of death improving (ie. fewer people dying), life insurance providers have been reducing premiums for many years.

If you are in a job at a big employer, it is likely to offer “death in service” benefit worth up to three times your yearly salary, and often a lot more. Do you really need all that life insurance cover on top as well?

4. Don’t pay for travel insurance you don’t need
Step 1 Obtain a European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) from ehic.org.uk or at your local Post Office. This has replaced the old E111 forms and gives you reducedcost or free medical treatment in EU countries and Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. You may even obtain treatment faster, as you won’t have to rely on a hospital waiting to receive authorisation to treat you from an insurer.

Step 2 Check your home insurance policy. Many have clauses which already cover personal belongings (ie. your suitcase) outside the home.

Step 3 Check your health cover policy, if you have one. These requently pay treatment costs incurred abroad. If traveling to Europe, the only real benefit that travel insurance brings is cancellation cover. Can you justify paying the premiums?.

If traveling outside the EU you must have travel isnurance If you go away more than once a year it is best to take a annual policy though again don’t pay for cover you don’t need. E.g., if you don’t ski or snowboard, you don’t need cover for winter sports.