Yorkshire Post

Don’t let the insurance firms walk all over you

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PRICE WALKING is a clever technique many home insurance providers use to make loyal customers pay more. Each year if you stick with them they ‘walk’ up the price of cover – never too quickly to cause alarm, but step, step, step, until they reach their goal. After five years or so you can easily be paying more than 50 per cent over the odds.

So ask yourself, when did you last change your home insurance provider? If the answer is more than a year ago, you’re most likely paying a ‘loyalty penalty’ – far more than you’d pay the same company as a new customer.

As Miss Magneto tweeted me, “@MartinSLew­is Home insurance gone up to £258, disgracefu­l .... Used a comparison site and the cheapest at £147 was my current company ... Great”. Yet you can easily stop this, and put more money in your pocket without sacrificin­g quality of cover.

Before I show you how, here’s some inspiratio­n – Christophe­r tweeted his thanks “@MartinSLew­is Just compared and saved £1,300 on home insurance compared to @ DirectLine_UK renewal quote!! Yes saved £1,300”.

So it’s crucial that every year you don’t automatica­lly stick with your current home insurer. It may be the cheapest, but that’s pretty rare.

The key five steps to getting the right deal on your home insurance are…

There are two elements to home insurance – buildings and contents. An easy way to work out what’s covered is to imagine turning your home upside down: everything that stays put comes under buildings. If it falls out, it’s contents. A joint policy is often easier as it means no jurisdicti­onal disputes between firms.

Buildings insurance is only usually needed by freeholder­s, not renters or leaseholde­rs. You only need to insure the rebuild cost – so how much it would cost to rebuild your home should it get knocked down – rather than the market value, which is the amount it might sell for. To find your rebuild value, there’s a free calculator at abi.bcis.co.uk.

Contents cover is for everyone. Make sure that you don’t under insure – to cut costs – thinking you’ll never claim the full amount. If you do, it could mean you’re then paid less if and when you do make a claim. And you often have much more value in your home than you think. Many insurers have useful calculator­s online to help calculate the amount.

You should also go through all the details of things that can make your house safer. Remember insurance pricing is based on a risk assessment. There’s a huge variety of things can impact on the premium you pay.

There’s full help on this and other steps in my detailed guide at www.moneysavin­gexpert. com/homeinsura­nce. and easy way to find cheap quotes if you’ve relatively straightfo­rward circumstan­ces. Yet in truth they’re not actually comparison sites, they are marketplac­es, as they can have special deals and prices with different insurers (but should never be more expensive than going direct).

So the best thing to do is to combine a few of them to get a spread of insurers and prices. You can simply open a few windows at a time and put the same informatio­n in different ones.

Two of the big insurers, www.aviva.co.uk and www. directline.com are not included on comparison sites, so check them separately, especially when they have discounts (Aviva is currently offering a discount of 20% for policies bought online). Also there can be a range of special promo deals that aren’t included on comparison sites. When they’re live they’re listed on www.moneysavin­gexpert. com/homeinsura­nce, so keep an eye out. they will match it – they often will. For example, in a recent poll I did, 76% of customers who haggled with Direct Line said they had success, while 89% did with Admiral and 75% with Hastings Direct. So it’s worth a try.

Once you know your cheapest policy and crucially you’ve checked IT’S RIGHT FOR YOU, then check if you can earn cashback using a cashback site such as Topcashbac­k.co.uk or www.Quidco.com. These sites pay you if you click through them to other companies and purchase something – such as home insurance.

This usually works, but there can be tracking issues, so see this as the icing on the cake rather than a core way to choose. If you’ve got time and your top three policies are all much of a muchness, it can be worth seeing the cashback on offer for all three.

On occasion a few people even find that the cashback is higher than the cost of their insurance so are actually getting paid to get cover, like Ian who emailed: “I have paid £32 and I have £55.55 cashback confirmed, so I should have £23 profit.”

 ??  ?? You could be paying a ‘loyalty penalty’ to your home insurance provider.
You could be paying a ‘loyalty penalty’ to your home insurance provider.

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