I read the number three times, in case I'd turned £386 into £486 in my head. I hadn't. The renewal email for our home insurance had arrived on 21 July, two days before the school holidays, and I'd filed it under "later" and then lived through holiday club, a heatwave and a week in Filey. I only opened it properly on the evening of Sunday 10 August, with the Sunday sort-out done, Mabel on the arm of the settee and the policy due to renew on Thursday 14th.
Last year the buildings and contents cover for our 1930s semi cost £339. This year the same house, the same cover and the same family came back at £486, which is £147 more. We haven't made a claim. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed except the date on the letter.
What I wrote down before I looked at a price
Home insurance isn't one of the fourteen lines on the bills sheet, because we pay it once a year out of the savings account where the annual bills live. So a jump like this doesn't arrive as a nudge on a direct debit. It arrives as one big number, which is perhaps why it felt so rude.
Before I opened a comparison site I copied the details off last year's schedule, so that I'd be comparing like with like:
- Buildings: rebuild cost £205,000
- Contents: £30,000, with accidental damage included
- Excess: £250
- Claims in the last five years: none
- Built in the 1930s, three bedrooms, double glazing, multipoint locks on the front and back doors
What I nearly got wrong
The first form asked how much it would cost to rebuild the house. My brain, which spent eleven years at a building society, supplied £255,000, the price we paid in April 2017. That isn't the same number. A purchase price includes the land and whatever the market was doing that spring, while a rebuild figure is bricks, labour and one bay window. I watched customers mix those two up at the counter for years, and I nearly did it at my own kitchen table. The old schedule said £205,000, so that's what I used, and the form's own rebuild calculator landed within a few thousand of it.
The second near miss was price. The cheapest result on the first page was £268, and for about a minute I felt very clever. Then I clicked on the cover details and found the excess had jumped to £500 and accidental damage was switched off. It wasn't a cheaper version of our policy, it was a different policy. After that I filtered every result by the same excess and the same accidental damage setting, and most of the cheap ones vanished.
The third was the start date, which had defaulted to the day I was typing instead of 14 August. Bought as it stood, that would have meant paying for four days of double cover.
Where we ended up
I used two comparison sites, about forty minutes on the first and twenty on the second, then spent another twenty-five reading the "what isn't covered" pages for the three quotes that matched. That was the least fun part of the evening and the part I'd least like to skip. We landed on £321, with a £250 excess and the same cover levels as before. That's £165 under the renewal quote and £18 under what we paid last year.
On Monday 11 August I bought it, then went into the online account for the old policy and switched off the automatic renewal. The confirmation email came back within a minute and I kept it. The new cover started on Thursday 14th, which was the day the old insurer would have taken £486.
I should be clear about what this is. It's what we did, in one evening, for one house. I haven't tested the new insurer with a claim (I hope I never do), and "same cover" is my reading of two long PDFs. Your own policy will say different things, so the thing I'd actually keep from this is the habit of reading yours properly rather than trusting my summary.
I printed the new schedule, put it in the folder in the bottom drawer and fed last year's through the shredder. Rob wandered in and asked what the noise was. "Eighteen pounds," I said, and he went back to his phone.
