Out of Focus - the diary of a student radiographer.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

A terrifying experience with the bad hair day




This blog post fulfils is a major cop out for the assignment A terrifying experience with the bad hair day at lazyblog.org. You can rate it if you feel like it here.

Friday, January 07, 2005

Calm Down Dear...

So it was time to renew my car insurance which was something I wasn't looking forward to. You see, I was going to have to put myself down as a student which I was sure would make the insurance companies run away screaming, or at the very least hike the premiums up. I couldn't take out the insurance under Adam's name as he hasn't any no-claims, due to him never having actually owned a car.

My current insurer sent though a renewal quote of £340 so I decided to start by getting a new quote off of their website. The thing I like about getting insurance quotes from the internet is, you can keep going back and tweaking it unitl you get a quote you like. For instance, I have found in the past that putting Adam down as anything to do with IT is more expensive than calling him a 'bank employee', which is true as he works for a bank. Just in the IT department.

Car insurance websites are getting easier to fill in, with less stupid questions, so I filled it in quickly and pressed the button to get the quote. The next moment had me shouting out: "Adam, I put myself down as a student and it quoted me £1200!!". After I calmed down, we discussed whether I could get away with calling myself a housewife. I wasn't sure but I went back and changed it and the quote went down by about £10. I smelt something fishy.

I don't know where these insurance companies get their database of registration numbers from but when I put mine in, instead of it coming up with a nice little 1.1, it had come up with a 1.4 VTI turbo-nutter-bastard, or some such thing. Luckily I was allowed to change it back to a 1.1 and the quote went down to £310, even with me as a student. Phew.

A few websites later, most of which got my car right, and I have a quote of £230, which includes legal claims assistance and NCD protection and I am down correctly as a student, so it looks like my fears were unfounded. A few insurers did run away screaming - like esure, which has a rather odd list of exclusions. According to that list, they won't even insure that annoying wombat, Michael Winner, who fronts their adverts.