Go Compare the Confused Meerkats at the Money Supermarket

Picture By Charles J Sharp - Own work, from Sharp Photography, sharpphotography, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

There was a time when renewing one’s car insurance involved visiting tens if not hundreds of individual insurers and comparing their quotes to find the cheapest.  And then someone invented price comparison websites which purport, by the power of Grayskull to be able to scour the internet for you and remove the chore.  However, while initially they did seem to be able to avail one of cheaper insurance over the years they’ve seemed to me to all converge on the same values.  Using the main four websites I find I get a divergence in lowest pricing of only 8 per cent.  This seems very odd.  How do so many different insurers get nearer the same price?  And how come the same insurers give different prices on different websites? 

Now it could be, of course, that any sensible underwriter would value my car and I as the same value risk after performing similar calculations and just always end up around the same market price.  However, instinct would suggest that there’s very little competition in the market then.  For some reason those who’s job it is to take risks seem to me to take little risks. 

Matters are further confused by the layouts of the price comparison sites on their quote pages.  These have become ever more simplistic yet confusing.  For example … many sites ask you to choose a “voluntary” excess for your policy but what they don’t make clear is that there is a separate “compulsory” excess.  These vary from insurer to insurer meaning that when the search values are returned they’re in price order but they’re not weighted in any way to show the cost of actually making a claim because the user can only specify the “voluntary” excess.  Therefore the user is not actually seeing a like for like comparison when they look at the list.  If the search machines were honest then the “voluntary” excess and “compulsory” excess would be combined and just be called the “excess” and any insurer who was not willing to insure for the “excess” the customer requested would be excluded. 

Don’t get me wrong this isn’t a fraudulent practice – all the information is there for those willing to read it but it’s presented in such a statistically complex way the only way to work out whose insurance is the best price and value is to transcribe the information to a separate spreadsheet.

The extent this matters, of course, depends on the value of your motor.  If your car is only worth £1000 and you have a the “voluntary” excess of £150 and “compulsory” excess of £250 then claiming would cost you 40 per cent of your car at which point you’d probably be better going for 3^rd party anyway…

Also there are other things that ring alarm bells about price comparison websites.  Presumably insurers are paying to be on there and they all use algorithms to calculate their quotes which while not all the same all have similar inputs.  Therefore they cannot incorporate any new factor into their calculations and their calculations of risk are all universally set against the same inputs – which does not seem the most subtle method of calculating risk. 

Perhaps this is how they all come out with the same answer…?

Also I notice that the sites year on year seem to become ever less subtle and more simplified.  For example you used to be able to ask for quotes without a courtesy car or without personal injury insurance or without breakdown insurance or without legal insurance and the sites would order the quotes according to these items being excluded but now they don’t seem to do this anymore.   Everything is bundled in as “standard” on quotes. 

One has to wonder too how companies that quote without breakdown insurance or without legal insurance seem to come out further down the list than companies with it … again the sites may show us which insurer is the cheapest but that doesn’t mean we’re actually comparing like with like. 

So this year I went outside the main four sites.  Last year (on the advice of professional Scrooge Martin Lewis) I used Quotezone but this year they were more expensive than the main four.  So I tried Direct Line … my quote was in the same area… so I tried Aviva … who wanted to give me a discount because they want to keep me as a customer for different products.  So in the end I did save about £100.  It was like pulling teeth but I intensely dislike the insurance industry and this made me very happy.  Let’s see if I can push it down further by haggling…

What really confuses me though is that if I don't have a crash my insurance quotes should go down next year because by definition I'm less risk ... but they don't ...by default even if I use price comparison sites they go up?  How is this possible when I'm less and less risk each year?

Tonight I shall be at...

A load of old Tosh - iba

So I bought another laptop to replace the one that had the defective motherboard and ...it turned up like this ... with the keyboard not even glued properly over the innards.  Is there something wrong with me?  Because either I'm a jinx or it's just impossible to buy a laptop that works anymore.  So for manufactureres everywhere can I just offer this one idea... You stop worrying about what processing chip it has, what RAM and ROM it's got, what graphics it has and what size hard drive you're offering and concentrate more on bothering to actually assemble the thing.  A computer is a device that can be instructed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations automatically via computer programming - this cannot happen if you just randomly throw a load of parts and a motherboard into a box with little to no thought whatosever as to how they're going to stick together.  It's so sad... I desperately want to give a manufacturer my hard earned money for a decent computer that will last a decent period of time but all they seem to want to do is fob me off with tripe that's fallen off the back of a lorry.  Such a disaster... On well 3rd time lucky.  2nd time talking to customer service representatives who want to bung be £30 to "keep the unit".  Yeah I bet you want me to keep it Debenhams... and people wonder why the high street is dying.

Nothing new- the Tom Tom Go 520

Some few years back Tom Tom cynically decided that a load of their old sat navs were now obsolete for no good reason when they worked perfectly …perhaps too perfectly.  However, they were adamant that because of problems with memory (they couldn’t remember the “lifetime” promises they made to me when they sold the product to me) …they would no longer make maps for them. 

Never-the-less they very kindly offered to sell me a new one “at a reduced rate” but unwilling to be consigned to municipal recycling facility my Satnav still struggled on bravely with maps that were several years out of date – confidently advising me to circumnavigate the Elephant and Castle roundabout in the wrong direction.  This was slightly annoying but my Tom Tom GO 520 and I came to an understanding.  At least until the other day … when it started to struggle locking onto satellites at all and decided it no longer understood anything.

Forced to purchase another I pootled over to Halfords website to see what they had on offer and what did I see but a Sat Nav with exactly the same name as my own which supposedly I am trying to replace...?  Are there two Tom Tom Go 520’s …?  If it really is a new product why not give it a new name? 

Perhaps because it’s nothing new… except new expenditure.

HP and the Great Wall of Refund Issues

Finally I have managed to get a refund on the extended warranty from HP for the computer I returned because the motherboard never worked even after they failed to “mend” it.  I spoke to a man who asked my serial number, my invoice number, my article number, my address, my date of purchase and my purchase channel and after collating all this information told me that I needed to email another department.

“Can’t you email them?” I asked.

“No, I’m the technical department.  I only deal with technical issues,” he said.

“But you work for the same organisation?” I replied.  “Can’t you just email between departments?  After all you have their email because you’re going to give it to me?  You do have email.”

“I can only deal with technical matters,” he said.

“But,” I responded, “then why did you ask me for all this other information - my serial number, my invoice number, my article number, my address, my date of purchase and my purchase channel if that’s somebody else’s job to deal with?  You can see the databases that hold that information therefore you are interacting with it.  You’re not just dealing with only technical matters.”

“I asked for the information to check that the refund details are correct?”

“So why do I need to talk to someone else?  Why can’t you refund me?”

“I can only deal with technical matters,” he said.

“But you’re not just dealing with technical matters,” I said, “because you’ve just asked for financial information.”

“Refunds are the job of another department,” he said.  “You need to email them through the address I will give you and they will respond within one to two working days.”

“Do you have a telephone number for this other department?”

“No.”

“Do you know where they are physically?”

“No.”

“You don’t even know where they are physically?”

“No.”

“So … are you behind a Chinese Wall or something? – you literally can’t communicate between departments?”

“What we do in this situation is I give customers an email and they email the refunds department and they respond within 1 to 2 working days and give the customer what they want?”

“How do you know – you have no contact with them whatsoever?”

“I can only deal with technical matters.  I can give you the email.”

“What if I write it down wrong?”

“I will spell it for you.”

“But I’m dyslexic.  Even if you spell it phonetically I might get it wrong.  Can’t you email it to me?”

“Yes, I can email it to you.”

“You can email me but you can’t email someone else within your own company?”

“I will send you an email now.”

We compromised and he sent me an email of who to email.