A Time of Magic » Insurance

Sorting out some car insurance for the French car

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 22:29:59 +0000

Getting cheap auto insurance quotes for a foreign car needs to be considered as something of a hobby as so much time needs to be devoted to it.

It’s not that you can’t get insurance quotes for the car, it’s that you need to call up after getting each quote and confirm that they know it’s a foreign car. Very frequently at that point they say that they can’t insure it at all so you’ve to restart your quest once more.

Now, I can understand that there aren’t massive numbers of foreign cars being insured but there are significant numbers of them. No longer are they the flash sports cars either: look around any town and you can see a fair number of quite ordinary foreign cars around. These are people who the normal specialist imported car insurers aren’t geared up to deal with.

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How specialised does insurance need to be?

admin — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 11:23:19 +0000

The insurance market is a bit of a minefield at times with all kinds of weird and wonderful terminology seemingly put their just to confuse you. And it does, doesn’t it?

In the end people tend to just get what seems to be the simplest insurance but that almost always costs them dear. I’m sure that most people realise that it’s term insurance rather than life insurance that they need to cover their mortgage, but what about those times when you need a specialist broker?

Probably the most complex insurance that most people would come across is 5th wheel insurance. It’s complicated because you’re looking for insurance for both a car and a house all wrapped up in one policy, hence this is one area where a specialist broker can save you a lot of cash.

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If it’s not the car insurance, it’s the car tax!

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:19:56 +0000

After a bit of hunting I managed to track down the car insurance certificate so I could get the car tax renewed the other day.

I’ve been keeping them out of sync over the past number of years as it’s just a pain to have to do the car tax, insurance and MOT all at the same time as the car tax people won’t renew it without current versions of the other two. It also has the plus point that it reminds me to see about getting car insurance quotes which ordinarily I’d been leaving far too late in the day to do anything about.

This year we’ve the added complication that I need to get the French car insured in the UK if I can manage such a thing at a reasonable cost. That in turn means actually visiting insurance brokers as you can’t do that kind of thing online. I need to work up to that I think.

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Tidying up for the winter?

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:53:48 +0000

We all dread the cleaning off of the lawnmower and assorted other things that need doing before everything is packed away for the next season, don’t we?

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.

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Cheap or good value car insurance?

admin — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:18:31 +0000

The problem with things like cheap car insurance is that you don’t know whether they’re basically selling you a substandard product or whether they’re giving you good value for money until the time when you need to call on the insurance.

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.

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Disability insurance

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:03:27 +0000

Getting disability insurance is something that must seem like a complete nightmare and an expensive one at that.

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.

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Getting your disability insurance

admin — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 11:38:27 +0000

Compounding the problems of the disability itself are the issues around disability insurance and of getting insurance generally if you’re disabled.

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.

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Taking a spring clean of the insurance

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 17:18:39 +0000

The Easter break is a great time to spend a little time to reduce your outgoings and possibly even augment the quality of your insurance cover.

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.

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Some hassles with the house insurance

admin — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:26:13 +0000

We’re in the midst of a claim for the house insurance and finding that the policy might not be quite so good as we thought it was.

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.

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More specialist insurers

admin — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:57:17 +0000

Although there have been closures and mergers of insurance companies all over the place during the last couple of years, that hasn’t stopped some of the specialist insurance companies.

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.

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