Home of Slightly Cracked Dreams

As I mentioned last week, we got our registration bill for the car. This often results in an avalanche of paperwork from the CTP insurer's in Queensland. Just to make life interesting. One such offer arrived yesterday from RACQ. While all our insurances are through AAMI, we have RACQ cover for when I lock my keys in the car or leave the lights on. Those incidents have been non-existant since we got this car in 2004, but that's a whole other post.

The offer this time from RACQ was a reduction by $10 on our bill if we switched our CTP insurance to them. While this offer would result in a $10 saving this year (the costs for insurance are exactly the same) the effects on our other insurance policies wouldn't be noticed until March next year when all our other insurances are due. See having 4 policies (CTP, Comprehensive Car Insurance, Home and Contents Insurance) with the one provider, gets us a discount of about 15%. 10% on Car ($660) and Home & Contents ($650) policies is a LOT more than $10 (over $100!).

Obviously it's sometimes worth looking at these offers and always worth running the numbers, for the most part offers that offer a saving for switching some part of your insurnace to another provider increases costs elsewhere. If you are considering switching providers anyway, this is obviously a good time to do it, and increase the benefits in your pocket. Alls I'm saying is, sometimes an advertised saving isn't a saving at all, if you look beneath the surface.