Home contents insurance advice

Thread dredge. I just had a letter from John Lewis with my contents insurance renewal which is £452 a year. This seems high. Is anyone aware of anyone else who will insure a bike up to £5k? I cannot find any policy wording saying that the AA do, despite what @Señor_Bear tells me. Is it just M&S? Hiscox will not insure me, FWIW.

I have had nothing but good experiences with JL, just seeing if it can be cheaper, at all. £452 covers everything in my flat, my bike, my girlfriends stupidly expensive handbag and £5000's worth of personal belongings when out and about.

do a yellow jersey for the bike and a (relatively) cheaper higher defaqto rated contents?

Recently renewed with Pedalcover after years being with M&S, who were great (replaced bike written off in a crash) but seemed to be increasingly expensive. Pedalcover were significantly cheaper, very easy to deal with, have great reviews etc, but (thankfully) haven’t needed to claim yet...

Aye, Pedalcover seem pretty good in terms of personal service (at policy inception and at renewal), and were about £200 cheaper for building & contents cover than M&S - both underwritten through AXA IIRC. Again, no claims experience.

I mean, it's not that bad to be honest. Yellow jersey wanted £30 a month just for the bike... So £43 or whatever it is per month seems like good value for everything I own and care about.

Will look up Pedalcover, ta.

Going through a quote with Pedalcover right now (they offer a club discount of 10% if anyone wants to get the LFGSS forum affiliated).

They seem very well priced, cover for our bikes in the garage and out on the road (up to 9k! not that we ride anything that would get near that), along with house contents, etc. quoted for £21 a month.

Unfortunately Pedal Cover ended up being more expensive than John Lewis. Very good customer service in getting the quote though. I should add, if I had two bikes, it would definitely be cheaper to use Pedal Cover, but because I only have one, it is cheaper to use JL right now.

answer is simple

Buy another Talbot. Obvs.

Hmm, I should look at this again, I need to update my policy a little.

@JB - don't suppose you know how long you can leave your house unoccupied with JL insurance?

I just halved my buildings and contents from Hastings to Sheila's wheels, allow specifying of bikes happily enough

Zurich do, though they don't cover racing and you need to specify items with individual value over £1k. Camera with lens attached counts as two items, should this affect you.

60 days.

Cheers.

Home insurance time as M&S were quoting me £670 for renewal. Meh.

Lloyds Bank had been badgering me about home insurance so did a quote. £160 (with 40% off for first time through them and also 10% for being a Lloyds bank customer). £170 (we're 4 years without a claim rather than 5 years I'd thought.)

Home Insurance Premier. Unlimited contents. Up to £10k in outbuildings and in the open. £5k of high risk items cover (jewellery, TV, laptop, etc). £5k cover for personal belongings away from home.

More importantly, up to £10k of bikes covered with any bike over £500 having to be specified in advance. That covers me easily.

T&Cs look ok: https://www.lloydsbank.com/assets/media/pdfs/insurance/home-insurance/home-insurance-policy-booklet.pdf#page=40

Will enjoy telling M&S to go take a running jump on their renewal.

just got £231 knocked off my nationawide home insurance by giving them a call
nationwide membership benefit
couple of things off the policy i didn't require
still nice and pricey compared to that ^ but it's coming home down

Reminds me, I took a closer look at my M&S policy as it had a breakdown of the costs for the renewal:

Contents (unlimited): £96.73
Contents away from home (unlimited): £425.79
Pedal cycle cover (£2000): £153.16
Legal Expenses: £27.15

So I could have got my current policy considerably cheaper by knocking the contents away from home cover down to something more sensible (new policy only has £5k away from home or so which is fine for us), but it was still going to cost a lot due to the way they priced bike cover (which changed a few years ago). The Lloyds policy covers bikes up to £10k total (with anything over £500 having to be specified up front).

The main cause of the large price increases tends to be change in bike cover circumstances. You get one or two years of bikes being covered inclusive before they switch to the model where bikes costs ~10% of the value to insure, this causes the policy to jump in price massively and send me on a hunt for the next insurer that includes bikes without a separate charge.

Renewal time.

Lloyds Bank had been badgering me about home insurance so did a quote. £160 (with 40% off for first time through them and also 10% for being a Lloyds bank customer). £170 (we're 4 years without a claim rather than 5 years I'd thought.)

Up to £293.51 as the 40% discount no longer applies. Will ring them tomorrow to see what they can do otherwise I'll go look elsewhere.

This is very much ihavenoidea territory for me - my insurance renews every April. I'm always too busy around then to deal with it. I can't change providers in the middle of the year, can I? It's with Barclays and it's super expensive, goes up every year.

My dad had a good experience claiming after a break in. Aviva, via M&S. Mixed online reviews though.

I'd speak to Pedalcover - good, personal service at quotation and renewal, realistic approach to bikes and possessions outside the home, and £200 cheaper than our previous insurer. No claims experience, mind.
[/shill]

fucking nationwide, gave me a wonderful discount to their original quote last year ( see previous page )
it appears as though they did fuck all to my policy and still charged me the full amount, only realised today as i got my new quote still at 690 odd, checked my bank statements and they still debited me 690 last year instead of the agreed 462, didn't really check as i kind of thought it had all been sorted on the phone, called today they have no recollection of that, so have asked them to pull the tapes and have a listen, kind of want to go full velocio and axa on them and try and claim for no claims discount i'm 99% sure they haven't been applying for the 20 odd years i've had the policy, could add up to a tidy sum, lets see what they have to say once they've pulled the tapes and had a listen

fuckers, thought they were a peoples bank owned by the customers, one of the good guys,

#trustnoone

So Hiscox are putting my premiums up again. I gave them a ring and asked customer loyalty, not claiming etc and they are not interested.
Is it normal for contents insurance to always go up?
I now have no incentive to stay so will start to look around.

Yeah, they rely on customers being too lazy to shop around. Only way to get a good deal is renew renew renew...