Paul Hammond's Blog

I had the pleasure of watching my twins Dylan and Niamh play the steel pans (you might know them as steel drums) in their school's summer concert this evening.  They have only been learning for 10 weeks, but they have come on enormously.  You can see them playing in the Soapbox video below.

(BTW, I misheard the name of the second song and captioned it wrong in the video; it should be "Janey Girl".  I didn't notice until after the edits had finished processing, and I didn't want to wait while it encoded it again!)

At the end of the concert, the head teacher came on stage to thank all the staff.  He thanked the recorder teacher, adding that she had also helped out the brass teacher this term; trumpets and tenor horns and the like.  She acted very modestly as if she had done nothing special, and then tried to validate her coyness by shouting out to the audience "I'm very good at fingering, I just can't blow".

I thought my head would explode from the pressure of keeping the laughter inside!

Most people know that you should probably shop around for insurance when your renewal is due.  It doesn’t matter what type of insurance – car, house, pet, life – you should always do the due diligence around renewal time to ensure you are getting the best deal for the right kind of cover.  Now, normally I am not so good at taking my own advice, since I have tendencies towards procrastination when it comes to that kind of thing.  This year was different.

The house insurance renewal quote came in the post (building and contents under the same policy) and I was quite surprised at how expensive it was.  It was up 10% from the previous year, and was in the £800+ range.  I asked my wife to check out some of the comparison sites on the Internet to see what other companies might charge.  She managed to find some quotes of £250-£300, which was obviously quite a difference!  I presumed this was because the cover was different, and that these quotes were somehow inferior.  To check, I asked her to get a quote from our current company.  Once she’d selected all the same options we currently have, the website told her it would cost us £310 to insure our home.

Wait a second.  Let’s review those numbers again.

Renewal quote: £825.  New customer quote: £310.  That’s a saving of around 62% on the initial quote.

I called the retention department to complain.  I was told that there were large discounts for getting a quote online, and that there were numerous “free” portions of the insurance right now for new customers.  In fact, the whole insurance industry in the UK right now seems to be geared towards customer acquisition and not customer retention.  Even so, no-one could explain where such a huge difference came from.  What was worse was that the retention team could not match the online quote – their software simply wouldn’t allow an adjustment of that much.

Then the helpful lady told me that I should simply cancel my current policy and take out the new, cheaper one.  Which is what I did.  So, I have exactly the same insurance with exactly the same company (that I am very happy with, by the way), at 38% of the cost.  Scary.

Ladies and gentlemen, check your policy renewal prices!