The renewal email arrived at 6:41 on the last Tuesday of term, while I was looking for Alfie's other shoe, and the price was in the subject line: £372. I read it standing on one leg in the hall with the shoe in my hand and said a word that Alfie repeated at breakfast.
Last year's renewal quote was £486, up £147 on the £339 we'd paid the year before. I spent an evening on a couple of comparison sites and moved to £321 with the same cover levels and a £250 excess. That switch saved us £165 against the quote. This year's £372 is £51 more than the £321 we paid last August, about 16 per cent, for exactly the same house.
Doing the comparison again
On Sunday 26 July I sat at the kitchen table with the laptop, the renewal letter and a mug of tea that went cold. It took about fifty minutes. The one rule I set myself was to type in exactly what is on our current policy: the same rebuild figure for the buildings, the same contents figure, accidental damage on both, the same £250 excess. Without that you get a lovely cheap price for a policy that covers less. The cheapest result was £310, and it had a £500 excess and no accidental damage cover, so I closed the tab. The next one that matched line for line was £344, from an insurer we've never used.
So by the end of the evening it was £372 to stay against £344 to move. Rob's contribution was to bring me a biscuit and say it seemed a lot for a house with a cat in it. If I'd stopped there, I'd probably have moved.
The phone call
On Friday 31 July, with the kids in the paddling pool, I rang the number on the renewal letter. Eleven minutes on hold, with a recording telling me my call was important. The adviser was pleasant and said £372 was the renewal price. I said I'd had a quote for £344 for the same cover and asked whether there was anything he could do. He put me on hold again for a couple of minutes and came back with £338, same cover, same excess.
I asked him to send the documents by email before I said yes, and I read the figures on them against last year's. They matched. Then I said yes.
I spent eleven years behind a counter and on the end of telephones in a building society branch, so I know the first number isn't always the last one. I'm not offering that as advice to anyone. It's just that I would have felt daft paying £372 without asking.
Why we stayed
£338 against £344 is £6 in favour of staying, and I took it, but £6 wasn't really the reason. The reason was last year. £321 was a first-year price, and by renewal it had become £372. I would rather stay with a price I've seen the second year of than move for a first-year price I haven't. Staying also meant no new set of documents to file and no new policy number to copy onto the back of the bills sheet, where the once-a-year bills live.
Over two years it works out like this. The renewal quotes would have been £486 and £372, which is £858. We paid £321 and £338, which is £659. That is £199 less for two evenings of fiddling and one phone call. And £338 is £1 less than the £339 we were paying in 2024.
The money comes out in one go on 14 August, and we'll be in Northumberland that week, so I've checked it's on the right card and written the date on the whiteboard. I've also put a reminder in my phone for the middle of next July, four weeks before it renews, so that the email can't catch me hunting for a shoe. If you're reading this with a renewal letter of your own, read your own policy first. Ours is ours, and yours will have its own small print.
