Insurance khunts

£25 "admin" fee to change someone from an occasional user to a commuter on my car insurance policy.

Total w**kers

You must admit these sorts of things are somewhat disproportionate though.

Even assuming that he speaks to someone in order to implement this (and increasingly he won’t have done), are we really saying that it takes 2 hours of work of someone being paid (say) £12.50 an hour?

They press a button, it send some automated workflows and that is it

I can understand a nominal £5 charge but £25 is massively disproportional.

I'm penning a letter to the financial ombudsman as we speak.

Iirc you are also a lawyer (of a sort) so upon second reading you may find that I was not criticising extortionate hourly rates.

thank you for your closer attention this time.

No, they’re saying it costs half an hour of the time of someone working at £10 ph, plus their pension NIC etc costs, plus a unit of compliance time, plus a unit of audit time, plus the proportionate costs of running an office, plus the proportionate costs of a phone line, plus a margin of 8%

and as that adds up to £23.17, they might as well round up to £25

 

you have to wonder if some posters have any idea how a business works

So someone can only do 16 of these a day?

Or would their target be closer to 16 an hour? Which do you think?

These ‘admin charges’ are a major gouge and the insurance companies know it, which is why they often waive them as a ‘goodwill gesture’ when challenged.

b 19 09:15

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So someone can only do 16 of these a day?

It was not a strictly accurate analysis of their costs/margins

and I wasn’t actually saying the fee is acceptable

My post was more designed to highlight by example the utter ignorance of supposing that anyone who charges [x] for a service is paying their employees [x]/time spent

As I would have hoped might be obvious it was an oversimplification to make a point.

The point of course still standing, that these ‘admin charges’ are a massive skim, entirely unrelated to the actual cost of providing any such administration.

yeah mine used to charge a commute premium even thought it meant car was in a gated, guarded underground garage all day, safe from buses and scrotes with screwdrivers etc

Coracle do that stuff myself as by the time I've explained it to some trainees and they've got it wrong a couple of times it's much cheaper to do it myself.

I'm steeling myself for my annual call to my car insurers to enquire why they've upped my premium by around 18% when a quick search online shows other insurers will insure me for just 7% more than my premium last year.

When my friend's car was bumped by another driver and her insurer wanted to write it off (cos old) she hung on to it and decided to change the insurance to third party - seeing as shed never get them to shell out on damage to it, going forward. They charged for that too. No refund on lower cover, oh no, just a charge for the change.

We thought about changing to TPF&T on ours cos it's ancient and worth fook all.  The wisdom of the insurers was to the effect that that would be at a higher premium because the kind of driver who doesn't care about their car and therefore goes for TPF&T is probably more likely to be reckless and have a crash. Of course that only makes sense if TPF&T is actually a cheap option which it isn't if they charge a higher premium for the reason the insurer gave. 

Thinking about the above I think has given me a slight insight into what it is like being 3-Dux.