It’s a battle that I end up facing the same time every year, but this time it was particularly tough; car insurance renewal time.

For the last few years I have been with Admiral for both car insurance and home insurance with a good experience and managed to get them to budge on renewal prices a year ago to make them relatively competitive. Car insurance renewal quotes are famously extortionate and can cost you an arm and a leg if you let them auto-renew but I was taken aback when this year’s rolled around and the quote came in at £220.82 or 51.6% higher than last year’s premium!

I was certainly expecting to shop around to see if I could get a better deal elsewhere but wasn’t expecting the insurance across the board to have increase by quite so much, seeing a jump to record highs.

Fuelled even more-so by these steep increases I set about with the usual strategy of getting a better car insurance price, here’s how I did it:

1. Look for car insurance as if you were starting from scratch. I always check every comparison site as many of them have different deals with the insurance providers. Here’s who I check with:

   • Confused.com*

   • Compare The Market

   • GoCompare

   • MoneySupermarket Insurance

2. Make sure you have all of these tabs left open or get all of the best quotes emailed to you.

3. Now it’s time to check if you can get additional savings on top of any of these deals. Some of these sites will offer you freebies as a new customer, but you may be able to get cashback on top, I always check with:

   • TopCashback*

   • Quidco*

4. It’s worth then totting up any additional savings to see what your overall cost will be and seeing which is offering the best deal!

5. If this is cheaper than the renewal quote that your existing provider has given you, it is ALWAYS worth going to the online chat and telling them you want to leave to go with a different quote. Unfortunately, this time Admiral did not match the quote but did offer me ~£70 of a discount just by asking and speaking with them - a number of times before I have got them to match or beat other prices!

6. If they won’t match or beat these then you now know who is better to go with - this is the route I had to go down but managed to secure the best deal with Aviva via Confused.com which worked out £84 cheaper than the renewal quote, but I also bagged an extra £36 cashback by going through TopCashback.

7. There will be other slightly cheaper deals available, but I never opt to go with an insurance company I haven’t heard with unless doing an extensive background check; the only other cheaper options here were to take on a telematics box to save an extra £20 which was not in my interest.

As a result of the shopping around and not accepting the auto-renewal I saved £120 in just under one hour of researching and chatting with Admiral. This is well worthwhile in my opinion.

Also, don’t forget that it is considerably cheaper if you can pay your car insurance annually rather than on a monthly basis; if going monthly this would have cost me an additional 10% overall which soon adds up! If you struggle to save, I would recommend calculating 10% of your current insurance premium a month into a good savings account (use things like round-ups and cashback to make these savings easier) and then you should be able to pay for the annual premium by the time it comes around (also accounting for a ~20% price increase; lets hope they don’t go up more than that!)