All direct with me.
Just re-doing my home insurance. Renewal price went up loads and I currently have an outstanding claim which makes it tricky. Found that the comparison on Topcashback yielded the best result by far. more than 25% cheaper than the next cheapest for the same cover.
I include my bikes in the cover as it was cheaper than getting a separate policy.
I hadnt realised they were now doing their own insurance comparison service. Just looked and seen it. Interesting that you’re saying they come out better. Makes you question how much margin the other sites are building in
I’ll be changing from Barclays to Aviva with the house move. Barclays was just being a bit pedantic and silly.
Renewing house insurance.
Thoughts on legal protection and home emergency cover? I don’t think I normally get them, it adds an extra £60 ish on and can’t work out if it’s worth it.
Renewal quotes are between £400 and £500 which seems like a lot of money but not unreasonable.
I’ve always had it. Used it once i think. I think its one of those things that if you don’t have it and one day you need it you’ll miss it, but won’t miss 60 quid a year.
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My house insurance is currently £113 for £500K building and £50K contents.
Do you live in Beirut?
What home emergencies have you ever had?
What legal protection might you realistically need (to do with your house)?
Insurance is a massive con 99.9% of the time - they rely on you overly worrying about the 0.1%
I thought that one of the benefits of the legal protection was that it provided non-house related legal cover also. Just did a Google and Compare the Market says it also includes:
- Personal injury claims
- Employment disputes, such as unfair dismissal or discrimination
- Disputes over faulty or damaged goods
- Issues with neighbours, such as noise and boundary disputes
- Disputes related to buying or selling a house
- Tax disputes
- Medical negligence claims
- Loss of salary if you’re called to do jury service.
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You’re lucky. Add an £8000 bike and some jewellery and I’m at £900. Ridiculous. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
The home emergency part always seemed poor value to me. It seems to cap the values covered to really small amounts (usually well under £500). Because of that I always thought I’d save the £30 and take the risk myself.
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My wife used it when she was being bullied out of a job for whistleblowing. It didnt go as far as tribunal in the end as getting the solicitor involved was enough to make them shit themselvss and offer a pay out.
Didnt cost us anything.
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Circumstances make a big difference, kids, cats, number of bathrooms, location, trees, previous claims. Yours seems particularly cheap.
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Yeah that does seem cheap. Ours is over 500 quid a year. Probably do need to shop around for something cheaper
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I’ve had pretty good experience of home emergency cover; when my roof started leaking they sorted out an emergency fix within a couple of hours for no charge.
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Mine went down this year but IIRC it was £329 which included legal cover and the bike stuff.
We do live in a low crime, leafy suburb and have many years with no claims so I’m sure that helps.
Insurance prices are affected by prior claims more than anything else.
Also adding on more extras than you really need.
The insurance covers a £2K bike but the minimum on general contents after we did a theft survey and realised that we don’t really have anything much that’s valuable that isn’t covered by the insurance specifically (e.g. laptops). We decided that the likelihood of anyone stealing tables, chairs, washing machine etc was vanishingly small and that’s where the most money has been spent inside our house.
I also have a separate bike insurance policy with Bikmo for £120 pa so should add that to my total cost if home insurance covers all your bikes.
I took items outside the home off my insurance (mainly for camping trips), based on never having anything stolen.
In general, I’m sceptical about the quality of cover for work related issues on a home insurance policy. I think I’d look for something more specific if I thought I’d need it. Being freelance I pay about £250 pa for indemnity cover up to £1m so I probably do pay for some of the things in the home insurance legal cover (it’s typically a contractual requirement and a work related cost, I wouldn’t bother otherwise)
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Have a look at the posts re Aviva mate, it’s helped a lot of people here with bikes. 
Yeah, that’s dirt cheap. We’re getting close to £800 and I imagine it will be over a grand once our water leak claim from this year hits.
As mentioned, multiple bikes, worldwide cover on the OH’s engagement ring, etc, plus being in central(ish - zone 3) London, and having >75% flat roof due to various extensions all ratchet up the price significantly.
Slightly confused by this. It’s not just theft you’re getting protection for? What if your house burns down? If you don’t have sufficient cover for those contents, even if noone is ever realistically going to steal any of that stuff, then you’re screwed?
The chances of a house fire in any year are about 1/1000 to 1/3000, depending on what figures you take.
According to government statistics, 50% of these start in the kitchen so any risk analysis should start here. We don’t have a chip pan and use oil sparingly, we don’t cook with gas. Fires also disproportionately affect smokers & more elderly people.
We also don’t smoke and have modern electrics so that covers off the next two biggest risks.
So our chances of having a house fire are certainly under 1/10,000, likely considerably lower than that.
So the question is, do you insure contents for the very worst case scenario or the more likely scenario?
I reckon the standard £50K will cover more or less everything if the house burnt down - it would be personal items that would be the biggest loss, not a table and chairs. If there wasn’t enough money to replace absolutely everything, then that’s life.
Like I said before, insurance companies want you to make irrational judgements when you calculate how much cover to take out.
It’s been shown in many studies that people in general are very bad at factoring probability into risk assessments, largely because they consider something that’s possible and weight it as much more probable than it really is (e.g. council tree maintenance 
)
Here’s the ONS stats for house fires that came up on google, just in case anyone is really interested:
I still have insurance 
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