One of the more easily overlooked things to tidy up is 5th wheel insurance. Sure, you’ll get around to cleaning everything out, but I’m sure most people just let the insurance on their rig just tick over from one year to the next. That’s just as much of a mistake as not getting quotes for your car insurance. More so in fact as you’re probably paying a good deal more on the RV insurance so there’s that much more to save.

Thus we found out that car insurance in France is cheap essentially because the level of service is far below that of even the cheapest car insurance company in the UK. An accident in France that would be considered a complete write-off would be repaired in the UK and there’s none of the hassle level associated with a French car insurance claim either.

Fortunately most of us never need to find out just how good our car insurance really is but it’s worth checking out a few review sites before parting with cash as sometimes you can get quite a big improvement in the level of service by paying just a little bit more.

Unfortunately it’s not something that you can just do without as you’re probably much more likely to need to call on that insurance at some point. Naturally, that increased risk is something that the insurance companies don’t like too much which in turn means that it’s often worthwhile to go through a specialist insurance broker who can take account of your own condition and will know which insurance companies are likely to look more favourably on it in terms of charging.

Even non-disabled people can find it difficult to claim on insurance as there are just so many ways for the insurance company to get out of paying you and, of course, having a declared disability makes that so much worse. Fortunately though there are a number of organisations out there to help disabled people through the maze that is insurance and not going through them is just asking for more grief.

To make the most of your time getting insurance quotes, you need to gather together the relevant information first. In practical terms, one of the easiest ways to do this is to run through a quote and keep a note of the information asked for to simplify things the next time around. However, even when you’ve done that, don’t be surprised to find a few different pieces of information being asked for by another company.

Yeah, it’s boring but potentially very profitable.

One of the issues we have is that they’ve hiked the excess ten-fold. Yes, it’s ten times what it was a year earlier. Net effect of that is that we find that we’re paying quite a significant chunk of the cost of the repairs ourselves and it’s not quite settled yet either. It’s that bad that in our last chat with them I was very close to telling them to just cancel the policy.

Whilst I’ve not, yet, cancelled it, I am definitely looking into an alternative home insurance quote at the moment. This time I’ll be taking a close read of the small print for sure.

Slightly complicated is that the specialists tend to use all kinds of original (read un-necessarily complex) names like extended service plan and whatnot. That said, they can often offer excellent value in their niche of the insurance market when generalist companies are often offering totally over the top prices along with all kinds of peculiar obstacles for what are, to them, non-standard policies.

Funnily enough, that’s not necessarily the case and for various reasons senior life insurance can be cheaper than normal insurance used for older people. The reason for this is down to complicated statistical effects that are far from obvious. Clearly we all know that the chances of dying are very high in infants thus there’s a major distortion in life expectancy from that angle. Thus, for example, the low average life expectancy in, say, some African countries doesn’t mean that once you clear your teens you’re only going to live to 50 or something: it’s very much skewed towards the young dying in large numbers.

Similarly, as you get towards the upper end of the age range, the older you are, the more likely you are to live a bit longer. Why this should be so is basically down to a whole raft of reasons: you’ve obviously passed the various childhood illnesses, you’re unlikely to be bungy jumping, and, less obviously, you’ve an element of luck (eg through not getting knocked down as you’ve crossed the road over the years).

Add that all up and you’ll generally find that getting a policy aimed at older people will usually be cheaper than continuing to use a normal policy as you get older.

Not only do you need the truck side of things sorted out but the accommodation can take quite a beating too, and then there’s all the plumbing to consider. One thing that’s also worth reviewing too is the rv insurance. That insurance is usually somewhat more complex than normal car or truck insurance given the usage profile of an RV ie lots of long journies with often little or no travelling between vacations in it. That complexity in turn means that there are often lots of ways to sensibly save money on the insurance: many more than you’d find with your car.

The reason is that we’ve the complication that we’ve a left hand drive car this time and need to see about “importing” it to the UK as well. Not only that but apparently we will need to cancel the insurance a couple of months before the renewal comes up thanks to French insurance law.

So, not only will my normal week in advance not cut it but it’s going to be rather more complicated than usual anyway.