Happy New Year!
It’s 2013 and today’s the first real day we all get back to normal. Back to work, back to the old routine, it’s an excellent time to start new habits and ditch old ones.
One for the girls…
My first tip of the year is one for the girls. At the end of 2012 insurers announced they would no longer be working out life and motor insurance premiums based on sex. Which doesn’t sound particularly exciting but it’s actually revolutionary.
Women are still safer drivers than men, especially young men. We are still less likely to be involved in a serious accident on the roads. But EU rules have outlawed the use of gender for underwriting insurance for motor cover. And for life assurance, when hundreds of years’ worth of mortality statistic prove that women tend to live longer and safer lives.
Insurance is, after all, underwritten to suit the particular risk you present and if you are less at risk, it ought to cost less. So the change is weird in one way. But in another way it makes perfect sense: if women want genuine equality, we have to accept stuff like this even though it doesn’t necessarily stack up logically.
What can you expect as a female driver? One thing’s for sure, you can bet your bottom dollar your car insurance and life assurance premiums won’t be going down! Expect them to go up, in the longer term if not the short term.
What can you do about it?
Tips for keeping your car insurance premiums down
- shop around every year at renewal
- focus on insurers who specialise in female insurance
- park your car off road if you can, on a drive or in a garage – the safer your car is from theft, the less it costs to insure it
- fit an alarm or immobiliser
- buy a cheaper car with a smaller engine size, which is cheaper to repair – cars with expensive parts cost more to insure, as do modified vehicles
- drive safely and maintain your no claims bonus – avoid speeding convictions, which push your premiums up
- check out the Which? car insurance review to get excellent value quality cover and good customer support
Tips for keeping your life assurance premiums down
- check if you really need it. Some mortgage advisers, for example, insist that you have to buy life cover when you take out a home loan. But you don’t – it depends on your individual circumstances
- adopt a healthy lifestyle
- shop around and switch regularly so you keep getting the best deal
- buy online
- think about cheap ‘term’ insurance, which is ‘no frills’ cover designed to repay a loan if you die before paying it off
- think about ‘decreasing’ term insurance on your repayment mortgage, where the premiums go down as you pay your mortgage off
What will you be doing to improve your money-saving life in 2013? Have you made any resolutions? If so we’d love to hear them and share the love with our readers!