Drive your costs down
Two cars or more? Multi-car insurance may not be the cheapest...
You may be able to save £1,000s on insurance if you have two or more cars in your household by opting for a multi-car policy. then again, 60% of the 2,100 people in a Facebook poll i did recently said separate policies were cheaper for them.
So how can you tell what will save for you? i’ve come up with a rule of thumb that can help.
Try the opposite to what you’ve already got first
if you’re at renewal and you have a multi-car policy, start by looking for the cheapest, separate policies for each car.
if you’ve got separate policies for two or more cars, start by checking multi-car insurance.
What tends to happen is that multi-car newbies get hot offers to suck them in, then that advantage usually erodes when it’s time to renew.
The top multi-car deals
Frustratingly, you can’t use comparison sites to do multicar searches (some look like they do, but they just forward you to one insurer). So instead, you have to do this manually by trial and error. Try as many of these as you can stomach...
✱ multi-car policies: The big name in these is admiral.com which would always be my start point. That said, aviva. co.uk and lv.com are major players in this field as well.
✱ multi-car discounts: Here you get a reduction on the cost to insure each additional vehicle. Try morethan.com (15%), axa. co.uk (10%), esure.com (10%), privilege.com (% varies) and sheilaswheels.com (10%).
There are also companies that in one way or another potentially offer discounts to those with multiple cars, but on separate policies. The easy way to do this is to use a comparison site for each car, keeping a note of these firms’ prices for each vehicle.
Plus, as the discount is off each additional policy, insure the car with the cheapest premium first because you’ll usually get the discount on the next (and subsequent) cars, This can be especially useful if, for example, one car is for a young driver, and far more expensive than others. ✱ multi-policy discounts: Here the discount is for getting, say, a home insurance policy alongside a car policy, but two cars also counts. For this, try directline.com (which isn’t on comparison sites) and churchill.com – the discount varies.
Do I have to be at renewal to do this?
if you’ve different cars in the home they may be due for renewal at separate times – so you may think you can’t switch to a multi-car policy. Well, don’t worry, the first thing to do is get a quote and see if it’s likely to save you a substantial amount. if it is, then provided you haven’t claimed (or reported an incident in that insurance year) on the policy that’s not at renewal since you last renewed it, then for an admin fee of £50 or so you can normally cancel your policy, and get the rest of the year refunded (you won’t earn that year’s no-claims bonus), and switch to the deal.