Jan
25Home insurance discount measures
Tagged Under : Home Insurance, Insurance
Rising costs are the prevailing trend for home insurance in the U.K. in recent years
Rising costs are the prevailing trend for home insurance in the U.K. in recent years. Home insurance covers what can be the separate policies of buildings and contents insurance, or a combined policy taking care of both. Cover for buildings insurance has increased in cost most sharply in the last few years.
This trend can partly be explained by the increased frequency of buildings insurance claims due to adverse and exceptional weather like flooding. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter if you live at the top of a hill, as premiums are adjusted nationally in a collective manner to meet the rising costs of flood damage claims. Maybe you can’t stop the floods, but you can still do plenty to keep your home insurance costs down.
The first tactic applies to most types of insurance, and involves taking a higher voluntary excess. A bit of a gamble, as you need to fork out more in the event of a claim, but if you do not need to claim you can enjoy savings of up to 20%, and bank the difference in a savings account. You’ll soon have a repairs fund built up, and can decide how you want to spend the money rather than just surrendering the cash to your insurer for what will hopefully never happen: having to claim.
Keep the incidence of claims down and you can attract another discount of up to 40%, the same type of no claims bonus more widely known about in the field of car insurance. You’ll only get this saving if the insurer knows about this clean history, so make sure that you emphasize the point when taking out a new home insurance policy.
This last point is usually another money saver – make sure you annually review your cover and don’t be shy of changing supplier. Use the price comparison sites to narrow the field, and then take the best quotes to those independents who aren’t included in such sites to see if they can better the quote. The next thing is that simply purchasing the home insurance policy online can win you a discount as high as 25%, as you save a lot of administrative processing for the insurer, efficiency savings that can be partly passed on to you.
Sources:
Santander – Reliable provider of home insurance.
