VAN INSURANCE NEWS ROUNDUP: 7 DAYS ENDING 28 NOV 2014:
If you’re not a big fan of shopping around for car insurance or van insurance every year, guess what: your laziness is costing you – likely more than you think.
For what it’s worth, nobody enjoys having to deal with insurance companies, especially when it comes to those parasitic little bastards that you have to, by law, associate yourselves with in order to keep your car or van on the road. Plenty of people just find the cheapest deal they can initially find – usually by checking an insurance comparison site – and then just mindlessly auto-renew every 12 months, but did you know that this costs motorists an extra £2 billion every year?
I know that sounds like a completely made up figure, but I’m not trying to take the piss out of you. The truth is that insurers almost always increase your premium cost from one year to the next, relying on laziness and apathy on the part of policyholders to not actually investigate how much they could save by switching to another provider. It’s a tactic that’s worked wonderfully well for insurers – but not so well for cash-strapped Brits trying to make ends meet, or ones that think their loyalty with a certain insurance firm will be rewarded.
Now I know what you’re probably thinking: but everyone keeps saying that the cost of annual cover is going down on average! Well that may be true for new customers, but it certainly isn’t for existing ones. Insurers need to attract new policyholders after all, and the best way to do that is to offer an attractive headline rate for the first year; at the same time insurers need to keep paying the bills, so the rates these new customers are charged are subsidised, by and large, by hapless policyholders who see their insurance costs ratcheted up year on year.
So how do you avoid being victimised by this business practice on the part of insurers? It’s easy, mate – just don’t auto-renew like a pillock every year and you’ll be right as rain. Yes, it takes a bit of extra work on your part but the savings alone are worth it. Do you want to be part of that £2 billion? I know that I sure don’t want to!
