How I Saved £179.43 on my Home Emergency Cover
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but I just realised that I have been paying well over the odds for another of my home insurance policies. This time it is my Home Emergency Cover.
To put you in the picture, soon after I moved into my current home with my now-deceased partner Jayne in March 1995, we decided to take out emergency plumbing and drainage insurance with a company called Homeserve.
We were strongly influenced at the time by a promotional leaflet enclosed with the water bill which indicated that if there was a problem with the water supply pipe from the mains, the water company wouldn’t be responsible and we could face a large bill to have it fixed.
Homeserve were offering a policy that would cover us in these circumstances and for other plumbing-related emergencies. Rightly or wrongly, we felt at the time it made sense to pay for this, especially as the company seemed to be endorsed by our water supply company (South Staffs Water).
We paid for the policy by quarterly direct debit and each year it rolled over, generally with a small increase. I looked after our household finances but never really thought much about this. The sums involved weren’t huge, and I assumed it was worth paying them for the peace of mind. As far as I can remember, we never actually made a claim on the policy.
Fast forward to 2019, and after taking stock of my buildings and contents insurance (and saving over £500 on it), I decided the time had come to put my home emergency cover under the microscope as well and see if there were any savings I could make. And again, there certainly were!
Doing the Sums
In December 2018 Homeserve said my insurance would be going up from £198 to £222 per year, working out as £55.50 per quarter (to be fair to Homeserve there was no extra charge for payment by instalments).
So I went online to see what alternatives there were for plumbing and drainage insurance. I did a search for home emergency cover providers on Top Cashback (a website that provides money back to people buying via merchants listed on the site – see this post for more details).
I could immediately see a few possibilities for saving money. Even allowing for the cashback on offer with TCB, though, the best deal I found was with another company called Home Emergency Assist. HEA offer a wide range of policies, some of which also include gas and electrics, pest removal, boiler servicing, and so on.
Obviously you have to be sure you are comparing like with like. With Homeserve I was on their Plumbing and Drainage Plus policy, which covered me for emergencies with the internal plumbing and external water supply pipes. There was a maximum limit of £4,000 per claim.
With HEA I could have bought water supply pipe and stop cock cover only, for a price (according to their website) from £1.49 a month or just under £18.00 a year. For a policy similar to Homeserve’s which also covered me for internal plumbing problems, I was quoted £42.57 a year. This is obviously a lot less than Homeserve’s price, and there was also a higher maximum limit of £5,000 per claim.
Admittedly Homeserve’s policy included zero excess, whereas the HEA quote mentioned had a £95 excess per claim. I was happy to accept that, but for the purposes of a fair comparison I checked their price for a policy with zero excess as well and this was £87.89 a year – still £134.11 cheaper than Homeserve quoted (and with a larger maximum claim limit).
So I cancelled my Homeserve policy, and (after a few more checks including reading their Trust Pilot reviews) have signed up with Home Emergency Assist instead. As I accepted the £95 excess, I shall be paying £42.57 a year, which as stated above is £179.43 less than I would have been charged by Homeserve.
I have, incidentally, nothing against Homeserve, but for me anyway their offer no longer represented value for money. Neither am I especially endorsing Home Emergency Assist. Although they offered the best price I could find for my needs, you might of course do even better by shopping around.
In any event, the real moral of this story (as I’ve said before) is not to let laziness and inertia ever stop you looking for better deals. Even with something as mundane and relatively cheap as home insurance, you may be as surprised as I was by how much money you can save.
- You can search on Top Cashback for home insurance providers (all offering cashback) by clicking on this link (affiliate). If you aren’t already a member you will need to register to get cashback, but this is free and only takes a few moments.
As ever, if you have any comments or questions on this post, please do leave them below.