Hitherto, I have let Her Indoors deal with this because she enjoys paperwork and I don't.
This year we got our renewal quote slightly earlier than normal, about three weeks before renewal time, but otherwise it was as expected, a couple of hundred quid more than when we started with them two or three years ago, so Mrs W dutifully wasted several hours on moneysupermarket and so on, but was not able to commit herself to going somewhere else and saving a couple of hundred quid.
Plenty of people have told me that all this changing-your-insurance-each-year is a mugs' game, all you need to do is ring your current insurer, tell them you've got a much cheaper quote elsewhere and then they drop their premiums to just above whatever you say the competitor's quote was.
Her Indoors told me if it's that simple, then why don't I sort it out?
Which I did. The lady in the call center was as nice as pie, and clearly had a script prepared for the occasion. She assumed incorrectly that I was low-balling but correctly that I didn't like paperwork so would not bother insuring elsewhere if her quote was only a bit higher than the competitor's quote.
So she dutifully hummed and hah'ed and waffled something about "Let me see if I can get that down a bit for you."
The upshot was, she knocked off exactly £150 from the original quote to a price slightly above what she believed the competitor's quote to be, we shook hands (metaphorically) on the deal and that was the end of that, it took all of five minutes.
Debate Magazine
