I’ve noticed enormous differences in price when shopping around for car insurance. Sometimes the way they calculate premiums seems quite illogical. When my husband retired, the insurance company that we’d been with for a couple of years added around £80 to the premium. I need Class 1 business use for our car, some companies included this as standard and others wouldn’t insure us at all.

There is great potential for saving money on running a car when buying car insurance. However, I’m not only looking for a low price but for a good standard of cover,without too high an excess. Using a price comparison site such as Moneysupermarket.com is a good place to start your search. I remember having to phone around several insurance brokers repeating all the details many times in order to find the best cover; it’s much simpler now, you enter your details once in the price comparison site and the results appear within a minute or so. Most price comparison sites have filters where you can tick what you want to be included in your quote, e.g. legal cover, no claims discount protection and breakdown cover.

I usually start my search for car insurance quote 30 days before my current policy is due to expire, as most quotes are valid for 30 days. If you do decide to move to a different insurer, you should contact your current insurer to tell them that you’re moving, so that they don’t renew your cover automatically, which could plunge you into overdraft on your current account or over your credit card limit.

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