Home Insurance - Buildings and Contents insurance

This page will help you to organise your search for cheaper home insurance. We will guide you to resources that will help you to accurately value the rebuilding costs for your property and your possessions. It is a very bad thing to be under-insured and if you over insure then your insurance will just cost you more without providing any real additional cover.

Here are two situations in which you will (probably) be paying too much for your home insurance. If you fit into one of these then it will be very worthwhile for you to spend a little time now to save yourself a considerable sum for many years to come.

If your Buildings and Contents insurance is with your Mortgage Lender

Your mortgage lenders insurance premiums are almost always considerably more expensive than an identical policy bought direct from the insurer or through a broker. Most of us accept the insurance offered when we take out our mortgage and then stick with it. After all when you are moving house you have more things to worry about than shopping around to save money on your home insurance. Your Bank or Building Society then profits from the fact that most of us stick with them through inertia, but it doesn’t have to be like that.

If you make the change today you could save around £100 and that saving will be repeated every year so during the typical 20 year lifetime of a mortgage you could save £2,000. Now that has got to be worth a few minutes to sort out. Some mortgage lenders charge you a fee if you take your insurance away from them. You should save more than this in the first year and some insurers will pay the fee for you to encourage you to move.

If you haven’t shopped around for a few years

Insurance rates swing like a giant pendulum. When a particular insurer finds that their home insurance “book” is losing money they tend to increase rates and impose more onerous security requirements. Other insurers enter the market and try to target “risks” that they think they can offer competitive premiums for and which will build into a book of profitable business. If your premium has gone up and you are of a type or live in an area or type of house that the new policy is trying to target then you could make major savings.

Insurers change their rating factors and become more sophisticated in their assessment of risk by post code area and house type over time. This results in changes to the premium that different insurers would apply to your house insurance. You really do need to shop around to find the insurers who would look at your house and you more favourably this year.

You really should review the value of your contents and possessions, may sources state that a large proportion of us have these inadequately covered and this causes cumulative problems should you ever be in the unfortunate position in having to make a claim. See below for full details of a simple method to calculate the value of your contents and possessions.

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Most people have not checked the rebuilding costs of their home since they had their survey done for their mortgage. In many cases this is not a problem but it is relatively simple to check it for yourself using the ABI/BCIS House rebuilding calculator ...........................

These pages are not just about finding cheaper insurance for your home they also provide you with information and links to authoritative sites that provide further guidance designed to help you to make an educated decision about the type and extent of insurance cover provide by various policies. We do not offer you advice on choice but we do provide you with the information and links to other sources of information that will help you to make an assessment for yourself. It is a self help guide for home buildings and contents insurance.

Why don’t you offer advice?

It is impossible to offer the kind of advice required by the Financial Services Act on a web site of this type. High Street Brokers traditionally provided their clients with detailed advice and took responsibility for the quality of advice that they provided. This cost money and increasingly people are moving away from using their high street broker to shopping around for themselves in order to save money. The FSA rules are there to offer some protection and help in the new world of the internet and telesales of insurance. We provide you with information and not advice, to a large extent you are on your own when you start dealing directly with insurers and as a result you need to be helped to make your own decision. This web site is here to help you to make your own decision.