How I Saved £511.08 on My Annual Home Insurance
This is a somewhat embarrassing post to write as a money blogger. However, I recently realised that I have been paying well over the odds for my home insurance for some years. And now that I have addressed the issue, I am actually quite staggered by how much money I will be saving.
To explain, I moved into my current home with my partner Jayne (now sadly deceased) in March 1995. With all the things we had to consider at the time we didn’t pay much attention to home insurance. We took out home contents insurance with Lloyds and buildings insurance with our mortgage lender Britannia. The latter had a special deal for members of the trade union Unison (which Jayne was in at the time), so we thought it must represent good value.
We paid for both policies via monthly direct debit and each year they rolled over, generally with a small increase. I always looked after our household finances but never really thought much about the home insurance. The sums weren’t huge, and I just assumed we were getting a good deal so it wasn’t worth worrying about.
Fast forward to January 2019, and Britannia wrote saying they were no longer offering buildings insurance and I would need to make alternative arrangements. At about the same time I got a letter from Lloyds saying my contents insurance was going up from £147.80 a year to £184.73 (a pretty steep increase in percentage terms). So I decided the time had come to pay my home insurance a bit more attention and see if there were any savings I could make by shopping around. And boy, there certainly were!
Doing the Sums
At the start of this year my buildings insurance premiums were £32.05 a month, which works out as £384.60 a year. Adding that to the latest quote from Lloyds of £184.73 gives a total annual home insurance bill of £569.33.
A bit of online research revealed that nowadays many people get their buildings and contents insurance in a single policy and this generally works out more economical. So I did a search for home insurance 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).
To cut a long story short, I wound up buying a combined buildings and contents policy from AA Insurance, with essentially the same cover I had before, for an annual premium of just £100.25. And with that I got £42 cashback via Top Cashback, effectively reducing the price to just £58.25. That represented a massive £511.08 less than I would have been paying in total on my old home insurance policies.
The AA Insurance website said that this was a special new customer deal, so I guess they might push the price up a bit next year. But of course, now that I’ve done it once, I will definitely shop around for prices (and cashback!) again when the time comes.
So the moral of this story 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 and price comparison services (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.
February 13, 2019 @ 5:55 pm
Wow – well done Nick. Our home insurance renewal recently came through & had gone up by over £50. I rang and selected the ‘I am thinking of leaving option’ on the telephone menu and the person I then spoke to immediately dropped the price by over £70, making it cheaper than what I paid last year. It’s always worth querying any price increase (usually works for car insurance as well).
February 14, 2019 @ 9:35 am
Thanks, Sally. I still don’t really know whether to be pleased about how much I will be saving or embarrassed/annoyed about the amount I have been overpaying!
And yes, I agree that phoning up can be a good tactic as well, especially if you prefer to stay with your current supplier or service provider. I have done this several times with Virgin Media, my broadband internet provider, and have saved several hundred pounds this way as well 🙂
February 21, 2019 @ 10:32 pm
My hubby and I did this with our broadband/phone provider. We said we wanted a better deal or we’d leave and sign up to another supplier, who had quoted us a lot cheaper monthly fee. Changing meant messing up our email address and changing our phone number, but if we had to, so be it. They uhhmed and ahhed for a bit, but offered us a reduction. Result! We’re now paying less than ever!