How you can save money on your insurance

Never, never just accept a renewal quote from your existing provider on your Home and Car Insurance policies. After mortgages, this is the most common area to limit your spending by finding other providers. According to the RAC, massive savings can be made the avergae shopper saving a whopping £214, while home insurance tumbles from £320 to£200. The internet makes it incredibly simple to find quotes, and if you don’t spend at least one lunch hour a year finding a better deal then you obviously have money to burn.

1. Investigate your PPI
Pricey and poorly sold, Payment Insurance is one of the most lucrative types of insurance created by the finance industry. It can add £3,000 to the cost of a £7,500 secured loans. But many people were sold it who can’t possibly make a claim against it these people are abel to demand their money back again.

Many companies are offering to calimthis moneyt back for you but they will take 25% of the refund. Instead, use the Fiancial Ombudsman Service which is free and they are helping 4 out of 5 people missold . Helpfully, it offers a factsheet on how to make a complaint about PPI which you can find at financialombudsman.org.uk

2. Cancel your mobile phone insurance
Many people are strongly pressured in phone shops into spending between £50 and £70 a year on this insurance. Most policies don’t cover you for the most dangerous type of risk airtime abuse (where the phone is stolen and used to make international calls), and if your phone is lost your home and contents should coiver it.

Mobile insurance is usually set up as a monthly direct debit, so it’s a very easy one to cancel.

3. Rethink your life insurance
Life insurance is not for life. Just because the life insurance cover was sold to you with your mortgage doesn’t mean you have to stick with that provider for the life of the home loan. You can cancel it at any time to get a cheaper deal. With the human lifetime improving (ie. fewer people dying), life insurance companies have been cutting rates for more than a decade.

If you are in a job at a big employer, it is likely to offer “death in service” benefit worth at least three times your yearly salary, and often much more. Do you really need all that life insurance cover on top as well?

4. Don’t pay for travel insurance you don’t need
Step 1 Obtain a European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) from ehic.org.uk or at your local Post Office. This has replaced the old E111 forms and gives you reducedcost or free medical treatment in EU countries and Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. You may even obtain treatment faster, as you won’t have to rely on a hospital waiting to receive authorisation to treat you from an insurer.

Step 2 Check your home insurance policy. cover is often provided when outside your home.

Step 3 Check your health cover policy, if you have one. These usually pay treatment costs incurred abroad. For most holidaymakers, who travel to southern Europe once a year, the only real benefit that travel insurance brings is cover in the event of a cancellation. Ask yourself if that is really worth premiums that are often pounds 100 or more for a family.

You mustn’t travel outside the EU with out travel insurance cover If you go away more than once a year it is best to take a annual policy though again don’t pay for cover you don’t need. E.g., cover for winter sports.

Sleep Advice

Austria – one of the best places to live

If you are looking for a different kind of sport, the extreme terrains of the Alps is for you with alpine skiing the most popular sport in Austria.  Similar sports such as snowboarding or ski-jumping are also widely popular.  So if you like to laze around covered with snow, listen to classical music and dissect the inner workings of mind and spirit, the comforting atmosphere of Austria invites you.  Find out why Austria is considered one of the best places to live.

First and foremost, music is the soul of Austria’s culture being the birthplace of many famous composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, Anton Bruckner, Johann Strauss, Sr., Johann Strauss, Jr. and Gustav Mahler as well as members of the Second Viennese School such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg.

It has long been an important center of musical innovation with eighteenth and nineteenth century composers drawn to the city due to the patronage of the Habsburgs, and made Vienna the European capital of classical music.  Generally regarded as the greatest of all composers, Ludwig van Beethoven spent the better part of his life in Vienna, cementing its standing as a nurturer of musicdom’s renowned stars. If you love music, Austria is definitely one of the best places to live and retire.

Austria not only prides itself in music but it also boast of a diverse cuisine which is influenced by Hungarian, Czech, Jewish, Italian and Bavarian cuisines, from which both dishes and methods of food preparation have often been borrowed.  It is the birthplace of the world’s famous persons, both revered and reviled, and boasts of a culture that succinctly combines the classical and the modern. Foodies will find that Vienna is one of the best cities to live in the world.

A landlocked country in Central Europe, the Republic of Austria borders both Germany and the Czech Republic to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the west.  Vienna, being a cradle of classical music, has reared into the world the geniuses of music with its atmosphere bereft then of the goose stomping army of the Third Reich led by the Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, a native Austrian.  In addition to physicists, Sigmund Freud also was born in Austria as well as the world famous movie star and current California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger.