Author Archive
Always take the time to make an online life insurance comparison
by The WebClinic on Jan.27, 2012, under Life Assurance
Like most people I find balancing the household finances at the end of the month a struggle. With three children all under eight and me not in full time work we need to watch every penny and I have become adept at making the money last and would be described by the popular press as a “Thrifty Mum”. I am probably not alone when I’m not only able to list all of my direct debits but also able to say the amounts I pay each week for each of them and the day they come out of our bank account. The control this gives me allows me to avoid worrying too much as I couldn’t cope with the thought of not being able to do so and the crisis I would be in would threaten everything I and my husband have worked together for. I have become very canny at looking out for offers and religiously cut vouchers out of the newspaper and keep an eye out for when the deals are on at the local Tesco supermarket.
One of the most helpful ways of saving money I’ve come across in recent years is to use the comparison websites to make sure that you aren’t paying a penny more than you have to on your household bills. I will regularly log on and do a life insurance comparison or a check to see if our buildings and contents insurance can be bought cheaper than we have it already. Changing electricity and gas suppliers is always worth considering as they tend to put up prices for people who don’t switch providers like the banks and building societies do for those who don’t move their money to the best savings accounts. I believe that we can save about one month’s salary a year by switching or threatening to switch suppliers. Sometime purely mentioning the fact that you are about to change provider to your existing provider will mean that they will drop their price by a huge margin. Its well worth trying, the alternative is too awful to contemplate.
I saved a small fortune on life insurance on the Life Assurance Cover website
by The WebClinic on Dec.14, 2011, under Life Assurance
I had always expected to become a teacher as both my mother and father had been teachers. It didn’t help by the fact that I had never really contemplated doing anything else and upon leaving school with the appropriate A levels for a teacher degree, I duly started at Teacher Training College. Three years later I was applying for teaching jobs in my home town, as I had never really contemplated working elsewhere. I married my child hood sweetheart and started a family with two lovely children and everything was wonderful. Wonderful apart from the fact that I really didn’t enjoy my work, I loved the teaching side of things, but all the form filling and unnecessary rubbish we had to do to support the vagaries of whatever the government of the day had decided that we should do to teach our children in a slightly better way than we had done the year before. This carried on for years and I grew to despise the job and tried to lose myself at weekends in whatever DIY project I had at the time. I loved the way that no one was there to tell me that I had to do it another way or that I had to fill in a form for someone so that they could produce a piece of analysis that would inevitably be used to tell me that I wasn’t as good as someone else, somewhere, and because of this I would to produce another action plan saying how I would improve, and so on and so on.
Anyway, one morning I decided that I would chuck it all in and become a full time do it yourself man and six years later I haven’t looked back. I have am independent in mind and body, I love my work and I’m probably a better person for it. I have had to become financially literate and now know my income protection policy from my permanent health insurance and my VAT rates from my National Insurance thanks to life assurance cover.
Please never buy life assurance from your own bank, instead I saved more than £125 each year using a site called www.LifeAssuranceCover.uk.com
by The WebClinic on Dec.07, 2011, under Life Assurance
Sitting in an airport lounge waiting for a flight connection is probably the dullest way of spending time I know, apart from waiting for the AA which is also up there in my list of things I would do less than go to have root canal work done by an inexperienced dentist. The process of waiting for a plane however can be transformed by WiFi which if you are lucky enough to be able to access from one of the comfy seats rather than the wooden seats in the Starbucks franchise is all the better almost making the whole process bearable. With two hours to kill I sat down and decided to work though as many emails I could, so reducing the time I would have to spend doing this at home. On this occasion this was all going pretty well with the delete button being pressed at an ever increasing rate until I came across an email from my travel insurance provider letting me know that the cost of my renewal would be about ten pounds more than I had paid the previous year, although the increase was affordable I thought that it would be worth spending a couple of minutes getting an alternative quote as, lets face it, what else did I have to do for a few minutes? As it turned out I could save myself ten pounds on the annual premium I was currently paying. Once you’ve saved a few pounds you get a taste for it. On another table along the top of the web page I could make a comparison using a website referred to as life assurance cover, find critical illness cover and other financial products. Saving money or rather stopping yourself wasting any more money is a tremendously empowering feeling and rather addictive.
Please don’t purchase mortgage protection from the bank, instead, I saved more than £455 every year utilising a site called www.mortgageprotectionquotes.org
by The WebClinic on Dec.02, 2011, under Loans and Credit
Sitting in an airport lounge waiting for a flight connection is probably the dullest way of spending time I know, apart from waiting for the AA which is also up there in my list of things I would do less than go to have root canal work done by an inexperienced dentist. The process of waiting for a plane however can be transformed by WiFi which if you are lucky enough to be able to access from one of the comfy seats rather than the wooden seats in the Starbucks franchise is all the better almost making the whole process bearable. With two hours to kill I sat down and decided to work though as many emails I could, so reducing the time I would have to spend doing this at home. On this occasion this was all going pretty well with the delete button being pressed at an ever increasing rate until I came across an email from my travel insurance provider letting me know that the cost of my renewal would be about ten pounds more than I had paid the previous year, although the increase was affordable I thought that it would be worth spending a couple of minutes getting an alternative quote as, lets face it, what else did I have to do for a few minutes? As it turned out I could save myself ten pounds on the annual premium I was currently paying. Once you’ve saved a few pounds you get a taste for it. On another table along the top of the web page I could make a comparison using a website referred to as mortgage protection quotes, find critical illness cover and other financial products. Saving money or rather stopping yourself wasting any more money is a tremendously empowering feeling and rather addictive.
Always make sure you get a life insurance comparison before buying
by The WebClinic on Nov.18, 2011, under Life Assurance
I have used the same insurance adviser ever since I had my first motorcycle and I needed to arrange cover. They always seemed to work very hard trying to get me the most competitive premiums and the process seemed to take an hour or so and I would always walk away with a hand written cover note and a feeling that it was very expensive but I had the best deal I could get. Looking back on those days, the trust I had in the staff in that office was based on nothing other than blind faith combined with the hope that if I thought it sounded absurdly expensive I might try the insurance broker along the road. Although having already taken an hour or more to get the insurance sorted out, the last thing I would want to do is to go through the entire process again and waste my entire day off. These days of course, like virtually everyone, I no longer use an insurance broker.
I use the online comparison sites and the rest of the population probably use the telephone. The online process is so advanced these days that, rather than taking half an hour, the time need to obtain a quotation is now down to 10 minutes and every form and cover notes are generated on a PDF file which arrived in your inbox within seconds. Whilst you’re on the website the system provides the facility to obtain other financial products as, from the comparisons site point of view, why stop with car insurance? Within minutes you can get a life insurance comparison. Arrange travel insurance and arrange a hire car to pick you up from the airport. The freedom the system allows is key, as you can access for your self a list of premiums and see for yourself how much cheaper one insurance company is over another.
PruProtect Essentials Plan
by The WebClinic on Sep.21, 2011, under Life Assurance
PruProtect, the joint venture between Prudential and Discovery, has set up a menu-based online Life Assurance plan which is a scaled-down version of the PruProtect plan.
Like PruProtect, the essentials plan comprises core serious illness cover and level, decreasing or index-linked life cover, unemployment cover and income protection.
To reduce costs, some features of the PruProtect plan are not available with the essentials plan.
For life assurance comparison purposes, these include automatic child serious-illness cover, a guaranteed insurability option for life cover, serious-illness cover and disability cover, optional serious-illness cover for children and immediate cover. However, policyholders can upgrade to the full PruProtect cover at any time.
The essentials plan takes the same severity-based approach to cover as the PruProtect plan so that people are covered for serious illnesses and partial disabilities, not just critical conditions.
The severity-based nature of the plan means that policyholders may get a percentage of the benefit rather than the full cost. This means that payments can be made at an earlier stage of the illness, even if it is not life-threatening.
Essentials could be useful for people who are looking for a protection plan that can adapt to changes in their lives but who do not need everything available with the PruProtect plan. For example, couples without children would not need PruProtect’s automatic child serious illness cover.
