My car insurance is due next month. Oh joy.. More worryingly the MOT is due tomorrow, getting done on Thursday and I reallyreallyreally hope it passes because my tax is due at the end of the month (so the weekend) and I'll be a bit screwed otherwise.
But yeah, insurance. Last year's cost £620. That included no no-claims of any sort, and Alex as a named driver. But I did live in the middle of the countryside and had a garage. So not too bad.
Had the renewal quote through - £660! OK so that's for the new address which is in the middle of town and has no garage (but does have off street parking), but I'd have thought that a year's no-claims and no other named drivers would have had some effect.
So on Friday night I got a load of quotes online. Two small issues with that (well maybe three):
confused.com is still a shit website. I had a good rant about it last year, for various reasons including that it makes you choose a password but chucks a fit if you use anything other than letters. Yup, not even numbers allowed. This really didn't impress me. Still exactly the same Now with the added feature of not letting me back in to view my saved quotes. Idiots.
phone calls. One of the great things about doing things online is that I don't have to speak to anyone. No sitting on hold listening to callcentre monkeys reading from their scripts and trying to make a commission selling me stuff I don't want. Or not - I've had 5 or 6 phonecalls in the last three days. I answered the first one (Saturday lunchtime) - "hello miss warren, you've had a quote from us I was just ringing to follow it up". That's nice. I told them I hadn't made a decision yet and would be doing it online anyway.. "ok then we'll ring back later". And they did. Luckily for me I now have caller display, so have since been ignoring any calls from 0800/0845 numbers (at least 5 calls from 3 different numbers so far). Particuarly unimpressed by the one which woke me up on Sunday morning.
women only insurance? that can piss right off. I'm not wasting my time getting quotes from Sheila's wheels or diamond or any other sexist insurers. Yeah yeah, women may statistically be better drivers so we 'deserve' cheaper premiums or whatever, but they can shove it. On principle.
But yes, apart from all that.. Cheapest quote so far was about £400 I think, which I much prefer!
Yes, my internet works again - which means I've uploaded all the stuff I've been working on offline for the last few weeks ooh, shiny new features!
Expect it all to break spectacularly, heh.
If you're reading this it means I've successfully moved my website to a different and possibly less flakey server...
Not quite finished with 'improvements' yet (ha, as if I'll ever be). Got loads more to do on the photo gallery, which I thought would be fairly straightforward but has actually turned into a much bigger project than originally planned.