Brake lights set me off. A letter I received recently kept me going. I hope you enjoy this rant as much as I did 
Car insurance is a necessary evil, for sure. Accidents happen after all. And we need to protect ourselves against the light-fingered.
But do the companies selling it need to be quite so disingenuous?
I’d been with Admiral for several years but the letter telling me about their renewal cost made me think. It’d gone up rather more than I expected. It felt too high.
So I needed to do some research of my own. Which is normally something that makes me think, Oh sod it, I’ll just renew … who likes doing that sort of tedious research anyway? But the increase was just enough to push me over the edge.
Fortunately these days this sort of research is much simpler: I used moneysupermarket.com but I guess there are others out there. I’d forgotten I’d used them in the past so they already had some of my details which sped the process along a tad.
In the end the research took me about twenty minutes end to end. And that was only because I wanted to see the effect of different voluntary excesses (a few quid up or down, nothing to really shout about). I resolved to move provider.
Next call: Admiral. Oh, you’ve been with us for several years sir, let me see what I can do. Thirty seconds later and £130 had been wiped off the renewal quote. Just like that. Now I’m sure it’s not just this one company that gets up to this sort of thing. But God it pisses me off.
End result: I moved. Because the new provider (not the absolute cheapest quote but the next one up … because they had a better customer rating) was just shy of £250 cheaper than Admiral.
So what’s the moral of the story? If Admiral had offered their best quote from day one I probably wouldn’t have moved: the renewal quote would’ve sounded ok so I’d’ve just gone with it. As it is they’ve lost a customer and likely several years’ worth of revenue. Let’s see if the new provider ratchets up the cost once they think I’ve got comfortable…
So who’s the new provider? Let me just say this: £250 saved. Ohhhh yes!