37%

[Gibbo2286]

That's the increase on my renewal premium for the C5 from Direct Line, £201 up to £275, same car, same driver, same mileage per annum, same no claims (40+Years).
Spent two hours this morning shopping around online direct with many insurers and with the comparison sites, nobody offers a better price so I guess I'm stuck with it.

[Michel]

I had this a few days ago with Direct Line. I rang them up, told them they were having a laugh and that I'd been a customer for years. 10 years + protected NCB. They put mine up from £220 to £325 for the Berlingo!

After politely voicing my displeasure they miraculously found a way to knock £65 off..

Sent from my SM-G925F using Tapatalk

[white exec]

I'm with Linea Directa, same lot (kind of). They've not been the cheapest, but in the event of a bump or rescue, they're excellent.
When faced with a premium increase last year, I wobble on the phone, and they asked what they needed to do, and what would be an acceptable figure. Careful, though - the giveaway phrase was "We're always able to adjust the cover", so a bit of caution is needed.

[CitroJim]

Pleased to see my bike insurance has gone down this year... Still costs more than it does to insure a small car though...

[Quackers]

I really don't get where the prices come from.

I had my 2007 C5 2.2 paying £52 a month over 11 months with Hastings Direct. I then got a 3.0 V6 2010 C5 and changed my policy to my new car details and it stays the same monthly if i just pay £75 up front. So i did that.

I then 1 week later phoned up Hastings about getting a second policy my older C5 i previously had insured with with them just a week earlier. £39 a month over 11 months. Why is it now £13 a month cheaper to insure the same car. I'm sure the weather effect what price they chuck out.

[GiveMeABreak]

Just also be aware chaps that if you leave renewal to within the last week or a few days of it being due, the prices will very likely rocket up!
It's a common and unjustifiable thing they do, as they know you have little time to get a deal. I got an initial quote at about the 30 day mark using my comparison sites and was quite happy that the premium has slightly lowered on the X7. I completely forgot for a few weeks, and then had a panic with the MOT having expired (first time this has happened) being due earlier than expected!

So when I came to tax it, with the MOT now obtained, I ran the quotes again and they had ALL gone up by a minimum of £50! So I thought, sod this, I don't need the car for a week, so I changed the date for the policy to start to a week later - and voila the quotes all came back down to what they were previously. The crafty sods - so be aware.

[white exec]

Similarly, don't take a look at the price of a flight (especially at short notice), then hesitate, and leave the booking until you've looked at a few others. When you go back, the price will often have mysteriously risen - because they assume you've found nothing better! If you must do this, use another computer - it's the IP address they remember, SFAIK.

Also beware Hertz. Their loyalty card has ensured that you pay more per hire than an unknown/first-time customer. I kid you not.

[Richard_C]

Remember that IPT started out at 2.5% but made its way up to 6% by 2011 to late 2015, then 9.5% to Sept 2016, then 10% and now our cheery chancellor has put it up to 12% from tomorrow (1 June 17). So if you add on inflation at about 3% and IPT you get to a 5% rise anyway.

The overall cost of fixing cars (not just yours, the ones you might hit) probably goes up faster than inflation, things like door mirrors aren't just glass on a stick like my C1, the C4 Pic has electric adjustment, auto dipping, folding, blind spot sensors and GOK what else and I dread to think what a new one would cost. A little bump at the front may well take out the aircon heat exchanger not just the bodywork, things like that.

Mustn't forget the newly announced "negative discount rate" for injury claims. In simple speak, if you get an injury claim and the courts decide you need £30k a year ongoing care, and life expectancy is another 20 years, that gives you £600k on top of any compensation. But you knock a bit off because it is paid as a lump sum at the start and you expect the return on the invested money to be higher than inflation - you apply a discount rate so the actual lump sum might be £500k. But from earlier this year the "official" assumption is that bond returns (which is the return rate used by the actuaries) will be less than inflation, so you apply a negative discount rate and the £600k payout which would have cost £500k now becomes £700k.


Now I'm not defending motor insurers but their costs have gone up recently. Still need to shop around (and sometimes deleting cookies on your browser using CC cleaner or similar can help so they don't see it as a return visit).

I got my renewal for one car and it had gone up by about 6%, when I started to look around I found some markedly lower headline quotes, but then when I started to add back all the things I had included like NCD protection, breakdown cover including Europe recovery (even if I had taken it out wholly separately) I ended up more or less where I started so just renewed 'as is'. Like an earlier poster said, make sure you are getting the cover you need.

[Richard_C]

Similarly, don't take a look at the price of a flight (especially at short notice), then hesitate, and leave the booking until you've looked at a few others. When you go back, the price will often have mysteriously risen - because they assume you've found nothing better! If you must do this, use another computer - it's the IP address they remember, SFAIK.

Also beware Hertz. Their loyalty card has ensured that you pay more per hire than an unknown/first-time customer. I kid you not.

Indeed, and a few years back Hertz started charging for their loyalty card in the US so you paid extra to be allowed to pay more. I have always found better deals by being a new customer. I suspect the loyalty card is really good for convenience and quick pick up if you are a very regular user because you don't have to reenter all your data every time but for once in a blue moon holiday hires its silly.

I'm not sure if airlines and insurers track IP address, in which case they would see another computer on the same network as being the same, and if your ISP gives you a dynamic IP address a router reboot would lose the trace, or a MAC address which is specific to each machine but not sure if that is visible, or cookies which you can delete between sessions. Maybe someone can chip in and explain.

[van ordinaire]

I never renew my insurance until the last minute, because I resent giving them the money before I have to but not so smart this time, as completely missed that the premium tax would go up between receiving the renewal notice & the renewal date.

That's on the C15, so couldn't face the nightmare of switching companies. Anyway I think it's gone down a bit this year, so no longer as much as the Caddy AND the Cherokee, surely only partly explained by them being kept in Devon, whereas the C15's my "city car"!

You know, I never understood why one of the first questions you're asked is "when do you want cover to start?" - I just couldn't see how thay had any relevance, until you'd accepted the quote & were actually arranging cover.

[ekjdm14]

I think the other factor in the C15 insurance being higher is, bizarrely, that it's newer than the Jeep and STS. I have noted when getting quotes on cars I'm attracted to that age has a big bearing on the premium somehow (can't fathom it myself, you'd expect a newer car to be worth more maybe but also be better looked after, safer AND a lot more secure than older vehicles.)

Even more, I think the premiums fall still further once a car turns 21 as it suddenly becomes a "classic" in insurance terms... For example, Black is a '95 model and costs just under £20/month to insure whereas White is a '97 and the best quote I've had from the same comparison site was £55/month, the V plate S2 we were thinking of is about another 8 quid more monthly than that, yet the '93 L reg 405 Mi16 I got a quote of £18/month despite arguably being a performance oriented vehicle (certainly much more so than a diesel Xantia)...

I, for one, am of the firm belief that insurance is calculated not by any real logic or sound reasoning but purely by whatever number some fat, balding middle-aged middle-management type decides to pull out of their ample behind on the day...

[Lenny]

I've still seen nothing to beat my renewal this year with Hastings Direct.
Having experienced perhaps the worst customer service possible when I started the policy I was intending to never darken their door again anyway but the renewal made me laugh my ruddy head off.
The original policy was just the right side of £250.
The renewal with and extra years no claims (total 10 years) and no claims, convictions or whatever?

£794.97 (yes, that's a 218% increase boys & girls)

Surprisingly I went elsewhere (RAC for about £220 ish)

[elma]

Thats just a dirty tactic in the hope that you forget and it auto renews at a massive premium. I always tell my insurer when I take a policy that I want it for one year and do not auto renew it. To date every single one has sent me a letter in the last month(ish) of the policy saying it will renew at a greater premium if I don't cancel it. I don't really think that should be allowed myself, it's a years contract plain and simple.
I think insurance is a total joke myself. Once you've paid in for a decade and never made a claim why do you have to keep paying? Surely you've contributed enough to cover any accident you may have. It just doesn't make sense to me that drivers who never claim have to keep paying. In fact the penalties for making even a small claim last for several years and are extortionate so should cover any bumps anyway.

[van ordinaire]

What really gets to me about insurance is that it's a legal requiremnt (& therfore, to my mind, should be tax free) but it's rarely financially viable to make a claim, e.g. I wrote a car off when I hit black ice at too many mph (the police report blamed the Highway Agency - but my insurance company refused to obtain a copy) the claim was settled promptly & in a reasonable amount BUT they wanted to increase the premium by more than that for a similar replacement car. It's not just car insurance either, I once made the mistake of claiming on my free mobile phone insurance: the replacement was available in Tesco's for 1/2 the admin. cost of the claim.

Comparative ages of the vehicles may well be a factor, I do remember that when I originally insured the '98 STS, it was about £20 more than the '97 the quote was based on, but I would've thought that would've been offset by their comparative values. Now here's another oddity, the red Cherokee cost an extra £30 - although it's 2 years older than the green one - apparently because the Orvis is a limited edition so, statistically, has a better claim record although, presumably, it could prove more expensive to repair.

[Jaf]

Well at least you don't have Spanish insurance. It's auto renew and you have to give them a couple of weeks notice. Used to be 2 months! They won't send the renewal to my post box and post does not come to my home address. It's a bu**er to change.