Be Excellent To Each Other

Note to self: get contents insurance.

I keep on meaning to, but then I forget, or get halfway through application before getting annoyed by the process needing to know the year my flat was built in (haven't a clue), what the roofing material is (haven't a clue) and what the flight speed of an unladen African swallow is.

Stupid insurers!

People who work in the insurance sector are twats, agreed.

Yes, all of the adverts say things like 'It only takes 5 minutes to get you a better deal!'.

Yeah, 5 minutes if you type and click very quickly while having all of the pertinent details to hand. As a fun aside I recently renewed my buildings cover, and by shopping around I knocked 50% off my renewal price. Worth doing, people. My pathetic existing insurance company made no effort to match it, even though I gave them the option.

Ditto, actually. Insurers are cunts.

Car insurers are just as bad.
Me: Hello, I've got a Range Rover I...
Them: I'll just need to take some details, sir - what's your name?
Me: Well, can you quickly tell me if you insure modified vehicles?
Them: Yes we do sir - can I have your name?
Me: Don't you want to know the list of modifications?
Them: Not yet sir, we'll get to that later. Can I have your name?
Me/Them: A good 15 minutes of dull crap
Them: Okay, what sort of car is it?
Me: A Range Rover.
Me/Them: A good 5 minutes of dull crap about the car
Them: Has the vehicle been changed or modified in any way?
Me: Yes, do you want the list now?
Them: I'm sorry sir, but we won't be able to offer you...
Me: RrrraaaAAAAAAaaargh! *slam*

You can picture this a lot better when you've heard Grim... trying to phone a taxi.

FTFY.

They will be told to grab your data no matter what - I got through a shitload of it with Direct Line and right at the end he "Went - oh we can't insure you on that because the insurance group is too high for your no claims period". He must have known from the moment I started the conversation what the score was and they spam me every year now near renewal time. I don't use the fuckers on principle now.

Ring ring... Ring ring...
Them: Hello, x-cabs
Me: Hello, I'd like a taxi from [wherever the Hell we were] to the Ibis hotel in Nottingham, please.
Them: Sorry, we've got nothing free for about an hour.
Me: What the fuck did you answer the phone for, then? *slam* (actually, *beep*)

Despite being a hoarder by nature, I don't place great - any, really - value on sentimentality and memories and that*; therefore this is just a list of the stuff I have that I like the most, but that could easily be replaced should it explode or be stolen (if the latter, preferably the former as well). So long as the insurance didn't stiff me, which rules out 1 being replaced, really.

1) M3 by far the best (judged on entirely personal criteria, it's a shit heap) car I've owned, and probably will ever own
2) 46in Bravia new, and good, and still worth what I paid
3) iPod Touch I don't normally early-adopt, and it continues to be a compressed slice of magic
4) NAS seems odd that it's here, but I've actually put the effort in to customise and improve it
5) I can't pick between my 360, 26in Bravia and bread machine, so I should probably have left this one out.

* That I don't makes me a bit sad as it (along with being completely devoid of interests and ambition) means my life is essentially empty, which is a stupid paradox. Hooray!

Quite.



I looked into insurance for my home contents after my iPod got nicked, but including stuff like a locked up bicycle and having stuff nicked while out and about was totally not worth it. The premiums and excesses would require me to have about 8 iPods stolen per year, and I'd still have to pay for about five of them back.

I pay £30ish per month for top-notch Tesco home insurance with full cover of everything. I spent about £250 on laminate flooring for the living room (which I laid myself), which was then somewhat damaged in patches by a leaky radiator. The loss adjuster approved a payout to their chosen local supplier, £800 less £100 excess I think it was, which would have been a fully-fitted like-for-like replacement. I told them I didn't like their local supplier and they had a cheque for £700 with me the next day for me to choose a supplier of my liking.

Our contents insurance (we rent) from LV is just over £100 a year, which is mental because no-one else could get lower than about £250. I can't find any holes in the T&Cs, so maybe they just don't pay out, ever.

I don't think I'd be too upset losing my 360 (I'm kinda resigned that the launch unit I have will go sometime) but it WOULD irritate me to lose the Hard Drive with my saves on.

I think that's the heart of this thread really, ease of replacement. Anything you can buy with money is, ultimately, replaceable and you wouldn't be too annoyed. Stuff like the wedding ring or the monkey is technically identical to a lot of others but is actually in reality one of a kind, stuff like the xbox hard drive becomes so via the application of the sheer amount of time you put in.

LV had some mentalist rates on some car insurance quotes I did recently too. They are a new brand, and I suspect they may be loss-leading some quotes to get word-of-mouth building. They have a lot of TV advertising running too.

My aforemention £34-a-month (I just checked) is contents+building, I should have mentioned.

Losing my saves would piss me off no end, losing my 360 wouldn't bother me at all. See also: losing my digital photo archive vs losing my laptop.

Aprt from MY Xbox hard drive which would take any normal, competent gamer a full 30 mins to restore the saves that I'd lose.

Oh, I'd be almost Comically annoyed if my stuff got stolen/exploded, I'd just get over it and buy anew.

LV is weird, it's not a new brand as such, just Liverpool Victoria rebranding. Certainly they're making a push this last year, but we took the policy out in 2006 for £100 - £110 was the renewal, and still way under half their competition.

I think they quoted about £3500 on the M3 though, which was triple the renewal from Admiral.

Fucking HELL. How old are you? What group is an M3?

Have you driven it/another car into a wall before today?

Group 20 I suspect. But isn't this how companies like this work - give decent quotes to safe bets and give exorbitant quotes to scare off high risk policies.

I have six years NCB and I'm 39 and I reckon I'd get a £3-4k pa quote on a five year old M3 worth about 15k. I've given up on performance cars as they're pointless in London - too many potholes/speed ramps/width restrictors/cameras/bad drivers to make owning anything other than something comfortable to drive completely pointless. If I lived in the sticks it would be a different matter

It varies from firm to firm and in my experience the guy you talk to on the phone never understands it. A bunch of analysts at HQ write business rules that interact with some complicate stats engines and the numbers that come out the other side are barely predictable to anyone. Hence sometimes you get a crazy quote like the LV one earlier in the thread, which comes down to a flat-out bug or some dodgy input data in the system. We used to see things like this in my last firm with airline ticket pricing.

$INSURER_A will have a pricing algorithm that favours, say, older drivers. They will have a high penalties for faster cars and younger drivers. $INSURER_B however will advertise as being particularly good for young drivers and fast cars, e.g. in Evo magazine, and they will not have the same weighting. I've seen this happen even when A and B are two brands run by the same firm, or two intermediaries quoting against the same underwriter. I suspect that the two sets of liabilities are accounted for differently on the backend, e.g. whether you can buy and sell liabilities on the open market like you can debts (I'd be unsurprised if this was the case), so arbitrarily high weightings are used as a sort of enforced demographic split.

I'm half-guessing though, reading between the lines of stuff I've read or been told over the years. I'd like to find someone who does this for a living one day and get the inside information.

Not in any real order:

1. My CD collection. I have around 400 CDs, all meticulously ordered alphabetically. Pretty much all genre's are represented, and tons of classics. Taken me a long time to build up and got a few signed albums, and some rarities too.

2. My Games Collection. Pretty self explanatory really.

3. My PC. It is so pretty, I spent ages customising my windows XP set up just right, and there are a bunch of irreplaceable files on it.

4. My house.

5. This one is cheating. My mantlepeice. I have around 50 assorted random items, all of very significant sentimental value to me. Old certificates, presents, letters, a pair of gloves that have a story to them, the CD (a burnt copy of Doves - The Last Broadcast) I listened to immediately before telling someone I loved them, the letter I received from google, the wine list from a restaurant with a story to it, postcards, old gig tickets and wristbands. Stuff like that, irreplaceable things.

There's this wonderful new invention called 'backing up'. You should give it a try one day.

Yeah, you are right. Although when I say irreplaceable, I don't mean 'important'

31, 20, yes; I went up the back of someone in the Octavia, in 2006. Thankfully protected at the time, so 5+ years NCB.

Part of the problem is the Liverpool postcode - home of uninsured, untaxed, incompetent drivers and thieves. Charl is paying £850 as the main driver of the Octy now, and a friend £600 as a new driver on an old-ish, small-engined Corsa.

Before the crash, when planning to move here, the quotes on the car I had then were going from £580 to £1500 so I swapped it for the Octavia, premium under £1k. 1.8 Focuses and the like were similar - insurers simply hated >100bhp round here at the time, although it's getting better.

I paid more last year, would you believe, so this year is a nice drop - stupid prices, but I factored them into buying it (you can't get much more car per pound), along with maintainance costs. I do regularly find myself... not wishing... wondering if should've bought something else. Ultimately it's worth it, though. I am Car Man.

Teh Rev: Spend the £70-odd it costs for a new battery for your Powerbook if it bugs you that much. I use it when I really need it be portable, the rest of the time it's in the fridge with a 40% charge (apparently the ideal conditions for longest life) and the old battery stays in the comp while it's plugged in.

My five, in no order:

1. My iBook G4. Even more so than the other computers I've had a long time (my PII-400 and my Inspiron 8200) this is a huge part of my life. I've done so much on it since I got it years ago, it's always by the bed in case I want to poke around on the internet before bed or when I wake up, and it lulls me to sleep with soothing internet radio stations. I've applied for jobs, bought houses and vehicles and more on it.

2. My Honda CB500. I've had it about six months now, but only in the last month has it finally gotten a permanent home thanks to having a garage door fitted to my... er... 'outbuilding'. It's just about right for me (perhaps a little too small, as I'm rather tall) but now that it's got a topbox and a screen it does everything I want. Yes, I get jealous of guys on GSX-Rs, but I'm proud to be riding a good bike when I see all the learners on their little 125s and scooters. It's a delicious blue and it bloody well shifts if I ask it to.

3. My Skoda Octavia wagon. It has everything I wanted in a car - a nice colour, air conditioning AND a sunroof, a CD changer, and a lovely amount of torque. It's not getting nearly as much use as it used to (the bike is a much more efficient way to get to work unless it's pissing down) but it's still the perfect car for me. A shame it won't fit into the garage.

4. My games collection. Loads of consoles, among the most treasured are my Colecovision and my Sega Genesis/Sega CD/32X monstrosity. I have a multisystem TV so in theory I could hook up a ridiculous collection of consoles spanning 20 years, from Colecovision to Xbox (the 360 naturally will stay on the nice widescreen TV)

5. Er, my house? It's enormous (as we have a lot of junk), next door to a chinese takeaway, across from a pub, ten minutes walk from the train station or town centre and without too many chavs in the area.