Quote:
Originally Posted by RobUK
Created a thread a while back (June last year) after watching a TV program about car insurance. The big takeaway from it was that of the 43 data points they collect off you, pretty much everything including your name can count against you! Here are a few examples of things you might not think are relevant but that can affect your premium:
- Having children added £146 to the premium vs. having no children.
- Using a gmail address vs. using a hotmail address added £391 to the premium!
- If you're born outside the UK you're more likely to pay more.
- If you have a foreign sounding name such as Ahmed Khan you could pay £462 more than if your name was David Smith. Also, someone with the name David Ledwell paid £1,169 more than someone called David Montgomery.
- If you're married you could pay up to £200 less than a single person.
- When answering the 'How did you hear about us' question, choosing 'From a friend' got you a £135 lower premium than if you chose 'TV Advert'.
The insurance industry guy on the program said it's all heavily data driven. So insurance companies look at their claims data and if they find people with gmail addresses make more claims than people with hotmail addresses for example, then they load the premium. |
Funny you say that I had a weird one with our house insurance the other week. We are with Direct Line and the renewal came through at around £450 (cant remember but more than last year).
So I did the usual and went online to DL's website and got an online quote and was astonished to get a quote of well over a grand!!!!
I edited the quote and all I did was change my name for the wife's (nothing else was changed) and the quote went down to around £300 WTF!!!!!!
So we took out the house insurance in the wifes name. We asked an operator at DL why my quote was so high just because my name was on the quote ... they had no idea.
Only thing I can think of is that we claimed off them to fix a ceiling about 3 years ago and wondered it that went against me (well, my name).
So if your house insurance quote is high, put it in your wife's name.