Since 2012, my wife and I have acquired a minivan, a necessity with the arrival of our youngest almost 2 years ago: transporting our 2 children, our dog and ourselves would otherwise have been a task very difficult, if not impossible! And then the air conditioning, which we then discovered, is priceless in the middle of summer! :). Even if the vehicle was not new, it seemed necessary to us to insure it against all risks: recent, in good condition, its value at the argus was not negligible and this choice was that of reason, or minimum of caution. Our relationship to money was different at that time, and we simply called the insurer of our other vehicle, and simply asked to add our beautiful family car. No negotiation, nothing: how to pay as much as possible without worrying about it could have been our motto at the time!
This is probably the simplest and most obvious step to save on car insurance, and to save in general: play the competition ! Comparing the prices and services of the various insurers in place on the market is essential to reduce the costs associated with your vehicle. And today there is a very simple way to achieve this: the advent of online insurance comparators. Go to LesFurets.com, AssurLand or type “car insurance comparator” in your favorite search engine (who said Google? Have you tried Qwant? 🙂 ), fill in some information and voila! Beforehand, remember to gather some documents that will be very useful for you to obtain your various quotes:
Then all you have to do is choose. Be careful, think about comparing the insurances in detail , the price not necessarily being the only discriminating element: amount of the deductible, third party VS all risks, 0 kilometer breakdown assistance, … It’s up to you to find the right compromise between service and price.
Concerning our file, we had until now an annual contribution amounting to 884,46€. The termination was requested for during February of this year, on the anniversary date of our contract. Date on which, thanks to the change of insurer, we will move to an annual fee of €575 all round. That is an annual gain, from 2014, of nearly €310, which is far from negligible.
The monthly payment is practical: it allows you to smooth out certain annual expenses over time, and allows you to replace a one-time financial effort by spreading this expense over 12 months. And it is undoubtedly a very good thing to offer this option. But in the world of car insurance, this possibility is very often (always?) invoiced. Admittedly, the monthly amount may seem insignificant, but reduced to one or more years, we arrive at an expense that could undoubtedly have been used in a more interesting way.
On our new insurance, the monthly payment is billed at €44 per year, or just under €3.67 per month. On my previous insurance, it was billed €2.29 per month, or €27.48 over 1 year. The potential savings are all the greater as the monthly payment lasts over time, as evidenced by the graph below which shows the cost of the monthly payment with my current and future insurance, according to the number of years in which it is put in place.
On our side, we have therefore stopped the monthly payment of our car insurance. Well, not exactly. It is actually practical to be able to spread these annual expenses over the year, which is why we have set up a monthly transfer to a savings account of the amount of our annual subscription divided by 12, with the triple advantage:
Apart from the time spent on the internet and on the telephone with the various insurers, this change will only have cost us the price of a registered letter, the one allowing me to notify my current insurer that I was ending my contract on the date birthday of the latter. Price which will be largely amortized this year :). In 2014, this transition to competition will allow us to earn €336.94 , distributed as follows:
Reduced to the month, this saving corresponds to a monthly gain net of tax of just over €28, which is a significant part of the €50 target that I set myself for 2014 on my monthly savings!
And you, have you ever thought about changing your car insurance? Are you satisfied with the cost/benefit ratio of the latter?