Insurance question - can I switch providers mid year/policy?

monkeypants

The missus renewed her policy at the beginning of December without shopping around. Now that the Christmas fuss is over, she's looking at quotes from 123.ie and they're much lower than what she's paying now for fully comp. Even though her policy is in place until December 2012, can she give thirty days notice or whatever they require and sign up for a new policy with 123.ie starting from the day after the old policy ends?

YumDeiseMum

It depends on the company she's insured with at the moment, and there may be an administration charge for cancelling the policy early

si_guru

Of course... but she will no doubt lose the NCB for the partial year and have some sort of penalty against her refunded premium I would think.

Compton

Depends how 'much' lower it is. It might not be worth bothering after admin fees etc may be charged

L1011

I've done this before but the new policy will need to be *a lot* cheaper for it to make sense; even if the insurer makes it easy.

It generally very easy to get out of a monthly direct debit policy, most insurers charge a cancellation fee of about €50 or so. But you will get absolutely no NCB for the partial year; which may make the new quote not as attractive anyway.

My price difference was about 20% of the policy moving from Quinn to 123; but I then got a far larger drop again on the 123 expiry to go back to Quinn so it may have worked out cheaper to have never left.

(~1900->~1600-> quoted 1200 with 123->950 with Quinn)

Otis Driftwood

Most insurers offer a 14 day "cooling off period" for renewals or new business but she is presumably over that.

TBH,Id avoid 123 altogether.Ive been working in the industry for two and a half years and Ive heard nothing but complaints about them (apart from being cheap)Crap customer service,admin fees applied for everything and anything and their retention rate for renewals is laughable.

Their ethos appears to be get customers in cheap,then screw them when renewal rolls around.They dont care about losing customers as they are writing so much new business.The amount of people Ive spoken to,even over the last 2 to 3 months that have left them for the above and other reasons is huge.

At the end of the day,like everything,you get what you pay for.If you buy bargain basement insurance,expect bargain basement level service.

kerten

I had to cancel my policy after three months as 123.ie refused to transfer my policy to my japanese import 1.0 toyota yaris.

What happened is I got %50 of what I paid to them after cancellation fees, etc plus I lost 3 months from NCB perspective as I started from scratch with another insurer.

So I would avoid cancelling insurance unless there is 40-50% difference between premiums and policy is in first 2 months.

L1011

Also to add you may have trouble with the new insurer not being too happy to use your previous NCB cert, you need to get a gap statement basically stating that you had no accidents but not providing any NCB.