When my car insurance is up for renewal I always turn to comparison websites to play around with quotes and see if I can make any savings on my cover for the next year. I would never automatically renew my policy with the provider I am with at the time and in fact on occasions I have come across a cheaper quote with the same insurer on comparison websites. The time when I made the biggest saving on my car insurance, however, was the time that I added my husband onto my policy.
Why did I add my husband onto my policy?
I had only been driving myself for a year at the time when I added my husband onto my policy and he was still a learner driver. My insurance was expensive even though I drove a small, 8-year-old Citroen C3.I expect this was due to my inexperience behind the wheel and I must admit I expected that adding a learner driver would make it more expensive. I was aware, however, that my husband would be passing his test soon and I wanted to be with an insurer where it would be cheaper to add my husband to the policy once he was a fully fledged driver. I was surprised, therefore, whilst playing around with a quote on Go Compare, to find an insurer that offered me a policy cheaper with my husband as an additional driver, even with his provisional licence, then they offered with me as the only named driver.
What did I do next?
After the initial excitement, I had a thought that this might be too good to be true and that actually once my husband passed his test the insurer might want more money from us. So, I played around with the quote in the system, pretending that he had just passed his test in order to see what effect that had on the price and was happy to find that it didn’t alter it. At this point, I was beyond happy with the quote but felt that I wanted to speak to the insurer to make sure everything was correct and that I hadn’t done anything wrong. When I spoke to the agent at Hastings, they too were surprised with the quote but said that they often have target groups of people, for whom they offer competitive rates to encourage them to buy their product, my husband must have been in their target group.
How long did it take me?
You would be forgiven for thinking that searching for cheaper insurance takes up a lot of time, but realistically it doesn’t have to. Comparison sites are very intuitive and do a basic search in a matter of minutes. In my case, to find the best situation for us I needed to try different scenarios and examine their effects on my premium. This involved me entering different details into the search criteria, but this took very little time as the comparison websites save all your information, so you don't need to re-enter all of it, you just need to amend the bits that you want to experiment with. Once you have found the right policy for you, you just need to click through the the provider’s website from the comparison site and complete payment with the insurer. I phoned them, just to make sure my policy was correct but most people don’t need to. All in all, searching for and purchasing this cheap policy took me about 2 hours.
Did the policy work out well for us?
We were more than happy with the policy that we bought. We didn’t make a claim on the insurance, so cannot comment on how Hastings handle cases but we were really happy with the level of cover and the price, given our inexperience in driving. My main concern was whether the results were correct when I played around on the comparisons site with the likely outcome once my husband passed his test. I worried that the price would go up once I informed my insurer that he now had a full licence. My estimation was correct, however, and once he did pass and I phoned my insurer, there was nothing further to pay. We had a double celebration that day, in honour of my husband’s success and our cheap insurance.