Tag Archives: FOXY Lady Insurance

insurance for women

Win Car Insurance Competition

Thanks to our FOXY Lady Insurance partner, Cornmarket Insurance Services, we are announcing a special insurance competition so that one UK female insurance policyholder can win up to £500 worth of car insurance at renewal time in 2018.

All you have to do is REGISTER FOR AN INSURANCE QUOTE (car, home, motorcycle or pet) – and read the Terms and Conditions on that page please.

We don’t promise that we can beat ’em all, but depending on perceived risk factors and during changeable market conditions, we are one of the only insurance services (if not the only?) to ring fence a totally female portfolio when it comes to motor, home, motorcycle and pet insurance.

Which is a good thing in most instances.

And there’s more.

An added bonus for non members

If you have yet to join FOXY Lady Drivers Club, just register for an insurance quote and enter this competition to receive a FREE Online Member gift subscription to FOXY Lady Drivers Club into the bargain. This makes you eligible for our Member Only insurance services.

If you are a member of FOXY Lady Drivers Club, please tell any female friends who aren’t.

We do this because only women can legitimately be members of a motoring club so we can then reserve our preferential insurance rates/services for female members of the Club. Who can then add partners and husbands of course. But not boy racers.

Sadly statistics confirm that it’s still young men that cause the majority of (and the most expensive) road accidents.

And being a motoring club for women drivers, our road safety advice and support services put women first and we don’t want to have to pay for these expensive male accidents.

Don’t miss out. We exist to save savvy Club members money. The more that join the Club the better the deals we can negotiate across the board. To benefit us all.

FOXY

insurance for women

Romeo, the London Shard Hotel’s adventurous fox

romeo_1Last month we launched a new insurance service for Club members and to get things off to a flying start we added a hotel competition to encourage them to register with us for an insurance quote.

The hotel we chose was the newly opened luxury Shangri-La which is part of the iconic London Shard.

Imagine my surprise to read that we won’t be the first fox-y customers to stay there.

Apparently a fox was found roaming the upper levels of The Shard during its construction and named Romeo. Seemingly he survived by eating scraps of food left by builders before being captured, cared for by vets and then released back into Bermonsea with the strict instructions not to climb high buildings again…

Goodness knows how he got there – not in the lift we’re told.

Anyway, to celebrate his foxy antics one of the gifts on sale in The Shard giftshop is now a cuddly fox toy, called Romeo of course.

To win a stay at the Hotel Shard

shardhotelIf any female would like to enter our competition to win a stay in London’s luxury Shangri-La Shard Hotel, a prize worth £1500 including £500 spending money, all you have to do is REGISTER for an insurance quote with us before the end of April. The more quotes you register (car, motorcycle and home) the more entries and so on…

NB: You don’t have to be a Club member to be eligible (and in fact non members will receive a one-off gift membership as part of any insurance quote during 2015) but, as you might expect of us, Club members will always get the best deal from FOXY Lady Insurance.

women's car insurance

New insurance website for women

We’re launching FOXY Lady Insurance today. It’s a new insurance website in the FOXY mould, for women and to help them find the best value insurance products in the wake of the Gender Directive.

Yes, price comparison websites do a great job in telling us what our choices are but as we all know from TV advertising not every insurer is there and you just might miss a better value deal by not trawling them all.

We also find that many women trust their existing insurers to invite their renewal at favourable terms when this mightn’t always be the case; especially now that insurers seem free to charge some women more for their motor and life insurance.

So we’re here to help women find a fair deal and pay a value for money price for the cover they need.

In a nutshell we’re inviting you to request a quote through our services (whether this is for motor, home, life, health or business insurance) and we’ll arrange for a FSA authorised and FOXY Lady Approved insurance adviser to take over.

That person may or may not be female (we think our register will include a lot of females but we’re equally impressed by men who listen and know their female friendly products) but they will ALL have signed the FOXY Lady Insurance Promise to…

“Always represent the best interests of women by listening to their needs before identifying value-for-money and female friendly insurance solutions to fit the bill.”

So if you know someone whose insurance renewal is imminent, has shot up this year or who’d like to discuss insurance matters with a friendly and informed insurance professional be sure to tell them about FOXY Lady Insurance so they can see if their quote is as good as it can be.

FOXY

women's car insurance

Real life research confirms women safer drivers

New analysis from telematics provider Wunelli has found, categorically apparently, that women are better drivers than men. But isn’t this what we’ve always known?

Based on the actual driving performance of 19 thousand drivers, over 40 million journeys and 154 million miles of travel their analysis found that:
+ Women drivers are 20% safer than men
+ Women drive 28% less at night than men
+ Women exceed the speed limit 12% less than men
+ Women brake hard 11% less than men
 
Sandy Dunn, Chairman of Wunelli said:

“Motor insurance rates to date have been based on estimations, trends and averages gathered and analysed over many years. 

“When the EU Gender Directive comes into play, insurers will need to rely more heavily on the postcode of the driver and the car type being driven to determine the premium.”

“For some women this won’t be a bad thing, but others could see their premiums rocketing.” 
 
“Telematics based insurance products mean motorists can be insured based on how they actually drive instead of being based on average behaviour.” 

“Up to now, because premiums for women drivers have been relatively low compared to those for men, the take up of telematics based products amongst female drivers has been slow, comprising around 30% of all telematics policies.” 

“We believe this will change as some women, typically those that are younger and driving more powerful vehicles, start to see more of a stark price difference between a conventional motor policy and a telematics based policy when they shop around come renewal time.”
 
“The really interesting point about telematics is that once you start analysing the data in an aggregated form, we get a very clear picture of how the UK’s roads are being used, from the roads where people speed the most to the car models least likely to have an accident.” 

“This information is already being used by selected insurers to enrich existing policyholder data to provide more accurate pricing of insurance policies. And of course, the more people take up telematics policies, the more conscious they will be of their driving behaviour and the safer our roads will become.”

FOXY comment

All this is fine and needless to say we’ll be ecstatic if the accident prone gender group (young males U25) buy telematics solutions which then influence their driving behaviour and save lives as a result.

Let’s see if this group buys black box insurance policies to monitor their driving behaviour.

But how can it be fair to expect women to pay extra for black box telematic devices to prove what insurers have always known – that women are the lesser insurance risk?

Not only does the installation of a black box alone add between £80 to £100 to install (I don’t know how much the additional annual contract is to analyse these) but according to the Co-operative Insurance website their black box insurance solution is unlikely to reflect in more than a 20% change in rates, either way, and it takes 90 days of driving before any adjustment is made.

So, young women in particular are expected to pay for an unnecessary black box to be fitted and their driving analysed, and it takes 3 months of paying 25% more perhaps, to earn a discount of 20% perhaps, to prove they are the safe drivers everyone knew we were to begin with?

Does that make sense to you?

Put simply, young women are to pay more so that young male drivers (the real accident risk gender group) pay less and whilst insurers and telematics solution providers get richer in the process.

All driven by the EU of course but not contested by our UK Government as far as I can see…

Where’s the gender fairness in all that for young female motorists?

FOXY

PS Very soon we’ll be launching FOXY Lady Insurance a website to compare insurer reaction to the EU Gender Directive from a female point of view. In the meantime, please LIKE our Facebook page and we’ll keep you posted with the latest news, female feedback and deals to be had to keep our insurance premiums down, fairly, wherever possible.

women's car insurance

Gender based insurance for females

Don’t do nothing about your car insurance and expect nothing to happen as a result of the European Gender Directive in December… Sure as eggs are eggs, motor insurance prices are going up for most women drivers, young females in particular, very soon. And there are several things you can do to reduce the pain…

Strictly speaking FOXY isn’t allowed to give insurance buying advice. But whilst we don’t sell insurance, we do share female feedback/deals within the Club, we do put females first and we are independent and FOXY-minded… so we do have some useful ‘tips’ for women about saving money here.

What Gender Ruling?

In a recent Go Compare survey a staggering 76% said they either hadn’t heard about any Gender ruling or didn’t understand it. So if that includes you, we’re talking about an EU ruling in December to prevent UK insurers from using their gender risk statistics to base insurance premiums on.

This means that from December 21 women drivers (and men with female named drivers perhaps?) will be expected to

+ pay more for car insurance (mostly for females U43)
+ subsidise accidents they didn’t cause
+ contribute to insurer profits (that nobody seems to be addressing).

What will happen as a result?

The truth is that nobody knows what’s going to happen as a result of the Gender Ruling. Too few insurers have put their heads above the parapet yet because they’re waiting to see what the competition is doing.

LV= was the first to say they’ll move to gender neutral pricing from 1 December and Sheilas Wheels is following suit on 18 December for new business.

Direct Line says ‘do nothing yet’, which we don’t agree with but we do agree with Aviva which suggests ‘younger female motorists will almost certainly save money if they renew their car insurance before 21 December.’

NB: Most insurers are reducing the period a quote remains valid from a typical 30 days so that any quote prior to 21 December is not valid afterwards.

Who is affected?

Young women under 30 years should attempt to renew their insurance before 21 December. This age group is affected most and seems likely to face big surcharges because (and this is why this is so ludicrous) this is the age group where their male counterparts have the most (serious and expensive) accidents.

It is estimated that young females may have to pay up to c25% more here after December 2012.

Women drivers between 30 to 45 years may be affected too (but less) so we suggest they do the same. Of course there are a lot of other risk factors to be considered.

NB: Women over 45 are unlikely to be affected much at all we’re told as the risk profile changes with age. In fact, older women have more accidents than older men it appears and whilst ours are usually minor ones borne out of distraction or a lack of concentration we’ve been paying our way for insurance here in terms of higher premiums and excesses than many men.

What about black box insurance policies?

Choose an insurance policy with a black box and you have just added £80 to £100 to your insurance premium because this is the approximate cost of the installation and the technology. So regardless of the statistics the insurers know about young women already, you will still be expected to PROVE you are the lesser risk gender by driving well enough to save that £100 premium; before you break even that is.

And not all black box policies are the same. Some insurance companies will quote you a black box price that requires you to promise you won’t drive at night, speed or drive dangerously. If you do any of this at any stage, this will be spotted and chances are your premium will rise; you have no control over this.

Other insurers will charge you a high-ish black box premium from the word go (ie to include the installation/black box rental/driving assessment) and then incentivise you with uncertain discounts after a period of several months, assuming you drive according to their requirements. Obviously it’s up to you to judge whether this appeals, but it makes it hard to budget when any saving is unknown; once again you have little control over this in Year One.

NB: FOXY is in favour of all initiatives that might save young drivers lives, bearing in mind that accident statistics confirm it’s young male drivers who need them most. But it is surely insensitive of insurers to hit young females twice here with the cost of unnecessary black boxes to be paid for at the very time the EU (and a weak UK Government it seems) is allowing women to be targeted for swingeing increases in motor insurance premiums because of their gender.

And everyone should be aware that some black box policies allow parental controls; so parents can see where you have been, when and what speed you were doing.

NB: Terms apply in all cases…

FOXY tips for young women drivers

1 Try to renew before 21 December 2012

Speak to your existing insurer about this before your policy is up for renewal. If you can renew at the same rate, renew for a further 12 months to give you peace of mind and the time to see where the best deals are next year.

2 If your existing insurer won’t play ball…

Find out what the cancellation costs will be (usually between £25 and £50) and shop around at a comparison website.

Remember that your premium might increase by up to 25% otherwise…

3 Look at locking in to a 3 year deal…

A deal you can lock in to for 3 years is being offered by Andrew Yule Insurance – they’re a family run insurance broker in Glasgow. From now until 20 December they’re offering a fixed price for 3 years based on current young women’s prices ie 17-24 year olds.

It’s a simple deal – you buy a 3 year insurance policy now, agreeing to pay the premium in 3 yearly payments by direct debit. Year One now, Year Two in 12 months time and Year Three 12 months later. The bit we like is that if a better deal is found when the 2nd/3rd payments are due, you can just walk away – there’s no tie-in to renew the policy on the 2nd or 3rd year.

As you might expect there are some underwriting terms and conditions but to find out more you’d be best to contact Julie at Andrew Yule Insurance on 0141 634 6827.

We make no commission from this mention and we’d welcome female feedback please.

4 Keep FOXY Lady Drivers Club posted

Please keep us posted via our Facebook Page.

And bookmark our new FOXY Lady Insurance website, coming soon, with up to date deals and details of female friendly insurance providers who seem on the case.

FOXY