Home Insurance

[93-DY-SAM]

My home insurance is up for renewal. I have been pricing around and have got a very competitive quote from Direct Line. It includes family legal protection, annual travel insurance and home emergency cover all of which I don't have at the minute. All of this plus higher limits on various claims paid out is coming in at a much cheaper price than my current insurance renewal.

Anyone had any dealings with Direct Line and are they any use?

[guy crouchback]

I'm assuming you are in the north so i cant give you very specific info on them (I'm in the business but in the south). they are underwritten by  a company called UK insurance who are all in all a fairly poor company but no worse then a lot of direct insurers and better then some.

the add ones they are offering you are mainly rubbish with the possible exception of the travel insurance although on the whole travel insurance is generally rubbish especially the ones going free.

the biggest thing is the increased excess, watch out for this, if you take a €1000 euro excess then you are probably ruling out making any claim under €1500 and if you make a claim for €2000 you will only get 1000.00.

if you are going to have home insurance have one that you can make a fair  claim against, unlike car insurance its not compulsory so just getting the cheapest thing possible to ''get it insured'' is pointless.

[93-DY-SAM]

Cheers for the feedback. Yeah in the North. Current insurance is under written by Royal Sun Alliance. I don't have any of the extras on my current policy but thought if someone else can do it cheaper with those extras I might as well have them. Excess wise all is the same between the two policies and the types of things covered in the minor details are more or less like for like. What I didn't want was to change and find out if I needed to make a claim that Direct Line would be a nightmare to deal with. In saying that my current insurer might be a nightmare to deal with, thankfully I haven't had to put that to the test.

It's like all insurance, you don't really know what you have until you need it.

[tintin25]

In my experience the cheaper you pay the more hassle of getting a claim paid!  Some insurers will be more lenient than others, whilst some will insist on keeping policy conditions to the letter of the law.

[Boycey]

What should someone be paying guy? I think my mortgage provider paid the 1st year, I jumped ship after that, my woman's cousin is a broker and he sorted it. Like a lot of people I guess I don't even question it, every year the renewal comes in I just pay it. I can message you any details if that helps.

[guy crouchback]

What should someone be paying guy? I think my mortgage provider paid the 1st year, I jumped ship after that, my woman's cousin is a broker and he sorted it. Like a lot of people I guess I don't even question it, every year the renewal comes in I just pay it. I can message you any details if that helps.

if the cousin in question likes you then he should be getting you the best deal available from the company's he deals with, assuming he is  a general ( home, motor commercial etc) insurance broker this will be all the major companies. what i mean here is that sometimes a broker who deals mainly with life insurance might have 1 or 2 agencies with  home insurance providers because they can sell it along with mortgage protection etc, if this is that case you are rarely going to get a particularly good deal ( or good cover).

as was mentioned above by and large you get what you pay for and it usually comes down to claims handling. most policies are all the same and on occasion some of the cheapest out there are on paper the best but then the company's in question would happily spend €1990 to get out of paying a €2000 claim.

a good yardstick to use when judging company's  is, who are they? , and by this i mean who is the underwriter, direct line for example are underwritten by UK insurances Ltd. if you have never head of them before then they are probably crap, if you have know the name all your life they are reliable, aviva, zurich, royal sun alliance, axa, etc

not that many years ago the mantra of the insurance business was ''utmost good faith'' the client was supposed to divulge all relevant info to the company and in turn the company most treat the client properly and  even if sometimes a claim was made that  fell outside the absolute definition of the cover provided,  the company would deal with it  and by and large claims were settled on a fair and reasonable basis.

with the advent of more competition and strangely much more regulation that day is gone and they are now only interested in reducing claims costs by any means fair or foul, this is particularly true of the newer and smaller company's.