5 ways to cut your car insurance costs

One of the most expensive aspects of vehicle ownership is the cost of insurance. There is no getting around this, as it is illegal to drive without insurance, but there are a few things that you can do to keep your insurance premium in check.

All insurance providers use a universal ratings system to assess the relative risk of one type of vehicle over another. This scale runs from one, for the smallest, cheapest, and least powerful cars, to twenty for large, powerful and/or valuable vehicles. So before you buy that souped up, fuel injected dream machine, think about whether you are willing to pay the higher insurance premium that it will entail.

1. Keep the number of listed drivers down. If more than one person is going to be using the vehicle, then their details must be added to the insurance policy for that vehicle. As a general rule, the more listed drivers that you have on your policy, the more expensive that policy will be.

2. Rather than listing all the possible drivers of your vehicle on your main policy, it might be a lot cheaper to add them for a limited time period as and when they need to use the vehicle.

3. Usually, when you claim on your insurance policy, you have to pay a certain percentage of the claim yourself, a fee known as the excess. If you choose to increase this percentage, you can significantly reduce your premium, but you should make sure that you can afford the kind of fees involved before you commit, as if you cannot pay the excess, you cannot make the claim.

4. Avoid making small claims. If you do not claim on your car insurance for several years, your no claims discount can add up to quite a substantial amount. However, you can lose this if you make a claim, so before you do, factor in the increased costs involved in losing your discount and weigh up whether you would be better off paying for a repair yourself.

5. Shop around. While it is important to make sure that you go with a reputable insurance firm for obvious reasons, you do not want to be paying more than you have to.

By far the best way to get the cheapest deal on your car insurance is to hunt around online for the best deals, as not only can you get instant quotes from a number of different companies this way, but you may also be entitled to special discounts for buying online.