Getting a good deal on your car insurance

Getting a good deal on your car insurance is about getting the cover you want for the lowest premiums available. It is about value for money, therefore, rather than a quest for the cheapest cover on the market. The latter could simply result in your arranging cover that is inadequate for your needs and fails to deliver what you had expected of it when the worst comes to the worst and a claim needs to be made.

Getting a good deal on your car insurance, therefore, is about knowing what cover you need and the considerations that will affect the price of the premiums you pay.

One of your first decisions, therefore, is likely to concern the level of insurance cover. The three general levels of cover available in the UK are the familiar: third party only; third party, fire and theft; and comprehensive cover. Since each level requires the insurer to take on a progressively wider range of risks, the premium for doing so also increases. Comprehensive cover, thus, costs more than cover against third party claims only (and cover against third party claims, of course, is the minimum level of cover required by law).

Any insurance is about assessing risk and in the case of motor insurance it is a case of assessing the risk of your causing or being involved in an accident which causes loss, damage or injury to you, any passengers in your car and third parties. In order to asses this risk, insurers have developed profiles of groups according to their level of risk and will therefore want to know your own sex, age, occupation and where you live. Similarly, if you have been involved in accidents in the past, the insurance company is likely to make the assessment that your chances of having an accident in the future are higher than normal. One way of increasing the chances of your getting a good deal on your car insurance, therefore, is to drive carefully to avoid such incidents as far as possible.

The opportunity for getting a good deal – paying less for the same level of cover – is also likely to increase if the car you choose to drive is in a low insurance category. These categories represent insurers’ broad ranking of cars according to their value, cost of repair, and performance. The “lower” the category, the less you should expect to pay for the insurance. By the same token, however, modifications to a car that are designed to enhance its performance or increase its overall value are likely to attract loadings that increase the cost of the insurance premiums.

Getting a good deal on your car insurance can also be a question of being prepared to assume more of the risk yourself. Most motor policies will have a “compulsory excess” – the first part of any claim that the policy holder him or herself must pay – but it is also generally possible to accept a further, “voluntary excess”, increasing the total amount of the excess.