I am not sure how well this may translate across the world as each country I am sure is different on the subject of insuring a car but I wanted to write about a few points that have bitten myself and others in the past when dealing with car insurance. In the UK at least, it is the law that you have valid insurance for you car and this comes as either Fully Comprehensive or 3rd party – most people I know have Fully Comprehensive. I am in no way an expert on insurance and I do not sell or endorse any company out there – this is just my own experience of when it all goes wrong.

The hard part – finding the right deal

There is countless web sites out there that allow you to compare prices of car insurance and may I just add that while these do help, they do not include all the companies and be prepared to be spammed to death on both email and telephone front from every single company on that list. While it might look like Company A is cheaper than Company B on these sites, you have to dig down into the various parts of the cover such as how much excess you have to pay, what is covered and a whole raft of other variables.

What happens when you have a crash?

I cannot remember the year but I owned and almost paid off my Ford Probe 24v. I was driving back home and was going around a large roundabout – I was in the right and was already on the road and half way around when a guy driving a Nissan micra had enough of waiting and spend off and into my direction. He rammed into the side of my car at speed, this caused me to spin around until I hit the metal bar in the middle of the lane I was joining and then started spinning the other way. I was stopped in fact by a sign on the side of the road, this managed to cut through my engine like it was made of butter. Given the time was now 5:30pm, once I had got myself sorted out – I called the insurance company (after the police and everyone else) and it was closed – in this instance then I was in fact stranded on the side of a major road.

My Lesson learned in this case was that you need to make sure there is a call centre open 24/7 and able to get you sorted after that type of major crash. In my case I had to get a train back home after spending money on taxi’s and been left without a car for some time – the insurance company is supposed to help you in this instance not hinder you.

How much is your car worth?

Still relating to above story, every time you take out insurance – they ask you “How Much is your car worth?” – this bears no resemblance to the price you will get if your car is written off. In the case of my Ford Probe 24v, they come back with the lowest price they could find by basically looking through the ‘For Sale’ adverts and looking for the cheapest. Now my point was that they had priced it as ‘Bad condition’ when in fact it was ‘Excellent’ Condition – they had not come to me for proof of this and of course now as the was was smashed to hell, no way for them to know anyhow. This now entered the next phase, the fighting for the right price phase. I say once again that this should never be a major issue as you have not only had a crash and lost your car but now have to fight the insurance company and still be without a car.

The Car gets Stolen

Your car gets stolen by whatever method and you call the police and then the insurance company – this is when you start to find out all that small print you should have read. The insurance company work on reclaiming the money back from someone – the person who stole your car is not found and nor is the car – so they won’t help you out. When you have no car, the first thing you want is a replacement car of some sort – in this instance we would say a rental car while the insurance company sort’s you out. Only a very small handful of insurance companies offer a rental car if a car is stolen and not recovered. This means not only is your car gone with whatever was inside but also you have to pay out of your own pocket for a rental car unless you fancy walking everywhere.

Excess on your policy

The more you agree to pay when you claim something, the cheaper your insurance. If for example they have an excess of £250, you pay for each claim £250 before they start to help out. Now this is in relation to you hitting somebody rather then people hitting you – in other words stuff that is your fault. Your driving along and your do not see that person coming out of the side road, you hit them and at this stage, you each blame the other party. The insurance companies will battle this out and eventually one person will get there car fixed by the insurance company while the other has to get that £250 out of there wallet to top up the cost of the fix. This leads nicely onto No Claims Discount.

No Claims discount

Here is how this supposed to work – provided you do not have an accident (which is your fault) and your car is not stolen (as that is also your fault) then you get a ‘No Claims Discount’. When you come to renew your insurance, you supposed to get it cheaper and as each year passes – the cheaper it gets right? Well first off, if after 3 years you do crash your car and make a claim, wave goodbye to them unless you pay extra and protect them. As each year passes the price seems to go UP for the premium not down and it is a case of searching again for a better deal – gone are the days of staying with one company for life.

Getting the better deal

A recent example (and the reason why I wrote this in the first place) – My Insurance is due for renewal on the 3rd Dec, my current company (ESure) sent me the renewal document. Now in this time I had swapped from a Rover 75 with a 2L 24V Engine and a group 10/11 insurance to a Fiat Punto 1.2L 16V which is about Group 5 I think. Imagine my shock when the price instead of been £224 was in fact £385 – wow, just wow. I rang them to discuss this but they made no attempt at offering me a cheaper price – there had been a lot of claims (not by me) in the past year and this forced them to raise the price a lot.

I called around and eventually stumbled upon NationWide and they offered as standard a car if your car is stolen, so I gave them a call. I added various stuff such as No Claims Discount, Legal Protection, valuables cover and various other bits and it came out as £375. I just called ESure to make sure they do not renew and they never tried to ask why or offer me a better deal. My point here is it pays to think about the worst that can happen (as it always will) and how they will act when it does.

A reminder – Prey is a program / project that allows you to track a computer or mobile phone in the event it gets stolen. It does this by installing a program onto the computer, adding the computer to your account and in the event your computer get stolen, you change it on the web page (using another computer of course) and the next time it is switched on and is on the net – all the information is relayed back to you such as IP, ISP and location. Of course it is not foolproof, should the said Thief wipe your machine / harddrive before putting it back on-line, then no way to track it. They have now introduced Pro Accounts which allows more computers and other good features.

Free Accounts

The Free Accounts are still there, this is 3 devices and 10 reports each and for most home users, this will be fine as this could include a desktop computer, a Laptop and an Android phone for example.

Pro Accounts

If you pay extra (a month) you get not only more devices you can track but also:

• Active Mode lets you know when your PCs last “checked in” by storing the timestamps of the heartbeats they send. This lets you know which of them are actually powered up and connected and which are not. Quite useful to detect when something weird is going on.
• Active Hardware Scan notifies you whenever a hardware change is detected in your PC, which is great for preventing RAM thefts (a common yet hard to detect kind of theft).
• You get the ability to increase the frequency for reports and actions up to super-fast two minutes.
• All your reports are secured with level 3 SSL encryption, so you can rest assured your information will always stay safe from sniffers.

You get a 10% discount if you choose to pay annually, and needless to say, you can upgrade, downgrade or cancel your Pro account any time, no hidden fees, no strings attached

How much is your device worth?

Looking at a company who might need to track a lot of devices, getting that laptop back quickly saves a lot of money, not just for the hardware but for the data stored on the device.

Prey is a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free.

Recover what is rightfully yours

Prey helps you locate your missing laptop by sending timed reports with a bunch of information of its whereabouts. This includes the general status of the computer, a list of running programs and active connections, fully-detailed network and wifi information, a screenshot of the running desktop and — in case your laptop has an integrated webcam — a picture of the thief.

Silent but deadly

Prey uses a remote activation system which means the program sits silently in your computer until you actually want it to run. If so, it gathers all the information and sends it to your Prey web control panel or directly to your mailbox. The thief will never know his movements are being watched.

And because there’s always hope

You may be thinking “but what’s the point of this program if the guy will probably just format the thing right away?” and you’re completely right. However, experience shows that thieves tend to look in stolen computers for valuable information, so there’s actually a chance you can catch the guy (and there’s even some successful cases!).

Besides, if by using Prey you can keep alive a tiny bit of hope that you’ll recover your computer, isn’t it already worth it?