£612. That was the figure in the renewal email, in bold, in a font slightly bigger than the rest of the paragraph. Last year the same Skoda cost us £529, and I looked at the number for a good while, because nothing had changed that I could find.
The email came on 24 February. The car is a 2018 Octavia estate that I bought used in 2021. We had no claims, no points, the same postcode, about 8,000 miles a year, and Rob is a named driver for weekend runs. The email talked about "a range of factors" and gave me no way to find out which. I'm not going to guess at them or blame anybody. I just know that a rise of £83 on a car that hasn't done anything differently is a number worth looking at.
The comparing
It took about seventy minutes on a Tuesday night, and twenty-five of those were spent finding the documents: the old schedule, the no-claims letter, the mileage from the last MOT. I put the same details into a couple of comparison sites, and filtered for comprehensive cover, the same mileage and the same extras as before, which were a courtesy car, windscreen cover and legal expenses. A good half of the first screen of results fell away once I did that. The cheap numbers at the top, I noticed, were often a different policy.
I nearly made a mistake at the first step. The form wanted drivers, and when I took Rob off, the price on one site dropped by £31. It would have been a very cheap way to find out, one wet Sunday, that he wasn't covered to drive his own family's car. I put him back, and I also changed the mileage from the form's suggested 12,000 to our real 8,000, because I'd rather the number was true than flattering.
Before I switched, I rang our current insurer. I waited ten minutes, explained, and was put through to a man who sounded as though he'd said it fifty times that day. He came down to £571. I thanked him, said I would think about it, and I did, for as long as it took to put the phone down.
Why I stopped at £478
There were two cheaper quotes than £478, one at £431 and one at £449. I looked at both closely. The £431 policy had a compulsory excess of £650, which means if I scrape the car on a gatepost I'm paying the first £650 myself before the insurer pays anything. The £449 one limited windscreen cover to a single claim and dropped the courtesy car. Both were cheaper because they were different policies, and I wasn't comparing like with like.
The £478 one matched the old cover line by line, and I know that because I printed both schedules and went down them with a highlighter at the dining table, with Mabel sitting on the pile. Where it doesn't match is the excess. Ours was £350 in total before (£250 compulsory and £100 voluntary). The new policy is £300 compulsory plus a £100 voluntary one, so £400 in total. That's £50 more to find if I ever claim. I decided I could live with it, because the emergency fund (the redundancy money, sitting in a savings account) would cover it without a wobble. Whether £400 would be a wobble for anyone else depends on their own sums, so read your own policy, not mine.
What it came to
£478 is the total over twelve months with the monthly interest included, which is how I compared everything, so it's £39.83 a month against the £44.08 we pay now. That's £134 under the renewal quote, and £51 under what we paid last year. The new policy started on 20 March, yesterday. The old insurer sent a polite cancellation letter this morning, and there was no fee, because the dates lined up.
The bills sheet in the cupboard door has a new figure in pencil. I wrote £39.83 above the £44.08, and didn't cross the old one out, because I like to see the difference. The renewal date for next year is already in the diary, for the last week of February. I wouldn't expect the price to hold; I'd just like to be looking before the email arrives, not after.
