How to get cheaper car insurance

Answer – sell your soul to the large Italian opera man with the silly moustache and let him work his magic.

Job done right?

No, of course not. Car insurance can be a rip off. New customer discounts, cheap breakdown cover, free cuddly toy. Where is there to turn?

Never fear, us broke thrifty motoring experts here. There are a few tricks to your form filling that can save you pounds merely on slight technicalities. You can stick with whatever silly car you’ve chosen to buy, don’t have to cut down your mileage, and save up to HUNDREDS OF POUNDS on your insurance. Do we have to sing a song now?

Now, while we are going to delve a little into the nitty gritty of applying for car insurance, we have to do the Ts and Cs first.

Obviously, it is illegal to lie anywhere during your insurance policy and any purposefully inaccurate information could void your insurance altogether. This includes address – so no, you can’t say it lives at your parents’ house in the Cotswolds if you live next to the A4 in west London. (If someone keys your car while you’re in your west London residents’ parking bay, someone will wonder why.)

And most of you will know this, but if you’re a youngster, you can’t put your mum as the main insurer and drive around as just a named driver. They’ll be onto you in no time when they find out the lowered, clapped out Clio doesn’t belong to lovely 45-year-old Karen and won’t pay out nudda. Suck it up and accept the brunt.

BUT – we can give you some tips to knock some pennies (or even considerable pounds) off your premium price. Just call us the nodding dog.

 

How we found the secrets

We’ve gone through the price comparison sites for this. We’ve used the one with the meerkats (other fiscal-expert ferrets are available) because someone got us the ‘autobiography’ in Secret Santa and we’ve been staring at it ever since.

We’ve done two quotes to show you the differences. One is for a 23-year-old girl, renting in Clapham, London, for a Ford Fiesta 1.25 Edge, ‘12-reg, 45k miles. She works in a supermarket and drives to work. We’ll call her Abi.

There’s also one for a 52-year-old married father of two, owning his own house in Sussex, with a ’67 reg Vauxhall Insignia. He uses it to commute and does… recruitment management or something. We dunno, we drive cars for a living, what kind of adult jobs are there? We’ll call him Mark.

We’d love to be offering price comparisons on our dream garage Mustang or any Ferrari of your choosing, but let’s be realistic here. We couldn’t afford a day’s rental insurance on that.

We’ve used the one with the meerkats (other fiscal-expert ferrets are available) because someone got us the ‘autobiography’ in Secret Santa and we’ve been staring at it ever since.

Start with the basics 

To save ending up with literally a million different quotes, we’ve kept some of the criteria the same for Abi and Mark. Both passed their test when they were 18, have 3 years No Claims, no points and zero voluntary excess.

We started each quote with the basics. Comprehensive insurance with 10,000 annual miles, kept in an office carpark in the day, in a locked garage overnight, with two cars per household and no access to other cars. Keeping up?

Mark’s initial quotes, (the cheapest with a household-name company via the money mongeese), was £580.

Abi’s initial quote was £1,200 on the dot. Eek. We made sure we weren’t including telematics box quotes, though (these are where a device is fitted to the car to make sure you’re not speeding or doing crazy driving, but can even include driving curfews.) Booooring.

Trim the excess (or add it on…)

Easy one to start. Each policy has its own compulsory excess – how much you have to pay every time you make a claim – but you can also add a voluntary excess. This means you’ll pay more if (when) you make a claim, but normally the premium is less.

With £150 voluntary excess added, Mark’s premium goes down to £507, and Abi’s drops by £102, down to £1,098. Every penny counts.

Keep an eye on this, though – younger drivers tend to have a higher compulsory excess, so it could add up. You don’t want to be paying more than a couple of hundred pounds in excess ideally, unless you’re just super confident you won’t crash. Although even Lewis Hamilton has had some pretty big write offs…

 

You could drive 500 miles (then 500 more)

The estimated annual mileage you put is just that – an estimate. The policy will not be void nor will you be charged if you go over the mileage you have provided (unless it’s 50,000 when you only claimed 500) – it’s not like on a lease vehicle. So don’t feel you need to give a buffer to avoid going over. Try and be realistic. We knocked down the annual mileage on both policies from 10,000 to 7,500.

Mark’s dropped to £491, Abi’s to £1,085. It might not sound like much, but Mark’s £30 saving is half a tank of fuel.

 

Say my name say my name…d driver

This is one of the most successful techniques, and will work a lot better for Abi than for Mark.

If you have a reliable fellow adult to add (eg Abi’s parents, Mark’s wife), with an equally good driving record, it’s definitely worth adding them to the policy, even if the likelihood of them driving the car is slim.

With his 45-year-old missus with no claims added, Mark’s premium went down to a bargain £424.

But by adding Abi’s 55-year-old dad AND 48-year-old mum with clean records and their own cars, her premium went down a welcome £200, to £892. Remember – they can’t be the policyholder, just named drivers. And bear in mind, if they have a history of convictions and accidents, it might not be worth it to sully your nice clean policy.

Garage classics

 A nice locked garage is the safest place, yes? No. For reasons we’re not quite sure. Reckon it’s because they don’t trust you to not smash off both wing mirrors reversing badly into the bricked cell.

By swapping from a locked garage to ‘Street outside home’ only drops Mark’s policy by a quid, but on Abi’s – and her lack of garage insertion practice – a chunky £24 saving down to £868. Again, we’re not really sure why, and we wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. But if you’re forking out for a private garage in the aim of getting cheaper insurance, you’re not missing out.

 

Being a jobsworth

This is another tricky and never ending one, because a slight change in your job description can make a big difference. This is the same with any of the named drivers too but we can’ t be bothered to do all of them, so we’ll stick with Mark and Abi.

Mark’s job currently says Manager of a Recruitment Agency. We played around saying Recruitment Executive of the Business Services industry, but it only made a difference of a few pennies.

But with Abi, changing her title from Sales Assistant in a Supermarket to a Customer Advisor in Retailing takes it down to £851, while saying you’re a Shelf Filler in a Food Store ups it back up to £871…

As said, don’t lie. Don’t say you’re a doctor if you’re a plumber and that you’re a rocket scientist if you empty the office bins.

Neither Pass Plus nor being in the Institute of Advanced Motorists makes any difference to your insurance price whatsoever.

Girl Power

Contrary to popular belief, in our examples here, when we swapped Abi back to an Alexander or changing Mark to Mary, the price didn’t change at all. So keep your necessary bits and bobs worry free.

 

Nerd points

As a heads up, neither Pass Plus nor being in the Institute of Advanced Motorists makes any difference to your insurance price whatsoever. So enough with the steering-wheel shuffling, please.

 

Hot Date

Another point to highlight – the start date of the policy also, randomly, makes a massive difference. When we were looking, we were using a start date in four days time. If you make the start day the same day you search, it can go up by LOADS – Abi’s went up by £35, and Mark’s by a crazy £120, just for being badly organised and doing it last minute. But, equally, doing it a solid 4 weeks in advanced also put the price up from our nice round Start Of The Month. So have a play about, if you’ve bothered to do it in advanced.

  

Compare the Compare

We went with the Russian furballs ‘cause they give you some free stuff. But it’s always worth trying the others as well. We found Abi’s policy £100 cheaper on the one for confused people, for a bargain £750 on exactly the same terms.

Policy upgrades and multicar  

Most companies have a basic policy and offer Plus or Extra upgrades that include a number of add-ons, such as breakdown cover, personal injury, legal protection etc. If you’re set on adding these (which are generally recommended), it might be cheaper to go for a higher-band policy than add all the extras later. Some policies may also offer incentives, such as a free MOT or even food vouchers, which might be more beneficial to you than saving £15 on another company.

As mentioned earlier, telematics policies offer a big discount on car insurance, but can limit your vehicle usability. If you’re a sensible and pretty standard 9 to 5 driver, this might not bother you, so you can get extra savings going with one of them, too.

Likewise, multicar policies tend to save some good pennies too. But we couldn’t be arsed to go through all that again with the Mustang so you can fight that one yourself.

 

Modifications and upgrades

Any factory upgrades you get at the point of purchase don’t need to be declared – they’re all in the vehicle spec sheet. What will need to be declared are an upgraded stereo, bodywork mods, any engine tinkering or bucket seats… They could void the insurance all together if not declared, or at the least, not be covered if you write it off – wave goodbye to that five-grand subwoofer if you chuck it down a ditch.

 

In the money

So, after all of that, the standings are thus;

Mark’s Insignia, with his wife, job, excess and parking updates, went from £520 down to £423. A hundred quid saving is pretty damn good in this day and age for the sake of a few clever box ticks.

But the real success is with Abi – knocking her £1,200 premium down to just £750. That’s £450 saved, and £450 is a lot of Jagerbombs (‘Spoons do two for a fiver, so that’s a solid 90 shots worth.) And all of it done without changing your car, your driving habits, or your usability. You can thank us later.

And – we know you’re dying to know. If we forget Abi’s Fiesta and chuck on a quarter mil’ McLaren 720S we saw driving round Kensington the other day, she’s looking at a bargain £7,800 annual policy (with a black box, mind) and a cool £1,000 excess. That’s more than the Fiesta cost in the first place. But yknow, McLaren.

Got any more tips of the trade? Leave them in the comments below, ideally before the McLaren policy renews next month…