Welcome to the Money Hospital blog.
Mark,
Joy,
Jeni,
Bill,
Sergey
and others are here to bring you the latest money and personal finance
news, stories and commentary, as well as money savings tips and suggestions.
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Seven money resolutions for the next three months. They make the most of seasonal opportunities to save.
And they prevent us from simply switching off after the summer, condemning ourselves to another year of paying over the odds for things like energy, insurance, debts, etc.
We’re all forking out more for car insurance these days, but £33,000 for a year’s cover takes the biscuit, doesn’t it?
Have you ever embellished what you do for a living to impress a member of the opposite sex? Or tweaked a job title on your CV to make you look more experienced than you actually are?
The average car insurance premium rose by more than a third to £843 in 2010, and a significant part of this increase has been attributed to higher fraud levels.
Every single day, 108 fraudulent motor insurance claims worth £1.12 million are detected, according to the Association of British Insurers (ABI) – and they reckon even that might be just the tip of the iceberg.
It’s an unavoidable cost to millions of you – and yet prices are on a joyride out of control.
The average motorist has seen premiums increase at a rate of 40 per cent over the last year. Younger drivers may have seen them increase up to 50 per cent; that’s more than ten times the CPI rate of inflation.
But just in case that doesn’t seem bad enough, here’s the best bit: thanks to the timing of a new EU rule that affects insurers, prices are almost certain to rise again by the time your next premium is due.
What’s the damage – and why?
In the UK, we spend a collective £19.5bn a year on insurance. So it might surprise you to learn just how much confusion seems to surround the subject. The Association of British Insurers has come up with a list of insurance myths – and we’ve checked them out to find out where the truth really lies.
Read our piece to bust some common misapprehensions about when our policy covers us – and when we really should be giving our insurers more information.
