No claims bonus

As we prepare for our 84th year the car insurance has to be paid.
Insurance companies do not like the over eighties,perhaps with some good reason.
I drove almost a million business miles here and on the continent.
Goodness knows how many private miles including semi permanent motor home life in France.
Never made a claim and I have noted previously the daughter gives me a quite harsh test every six months. I feel confident and am very aware if I start to tire I must rest although 100 mile round trip would be a long,long journey. I must be reaching the end of my driving career.
So what benefit to me is the payment of a premium of Ā£45.00 to protect my No claims bonus. If I was ever involved in an accident I would stop driving immediately.

Car damaged but not in an accident springs to mind.

Theft, vandalism, car park damage while you are elsewhere, fire etc

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If you have a bump I think you only lose some of your no claims bonus. I think you lose 20 percent, so 60 becomes 40.

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My elderly father had an unexpected accident having blacked out whilst driving. Fortunately no one was injured. He gave up his license voluntarily straight away, not wanting to be a risk to others.

Protected no claims is essentially insurance of your insurance premium. It may be useful to some (those that would hate to lose such a long standing benefit) but itā€™s not something I bother with - insurance is to protect against disasters.

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Ā£45 is nothing. Itā€™s not worth thinking about. You donā€™t need the no claim discount until you need it. Also if you have a claim, even if itā€™s totally not your fault (eg someone steals your car and writes it off), your base insurance cost will rise massively at renewal. You will be very glad of the no claim discount then.

If it were me, I would pay it happily.

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Iā€™m the same. Havenā€™t had a car accident in over 30 years, so Iā€™m quids in.

The only thing I insure is my house and car. With the money Iā€™ve saved over the years by not insuring white goods would pay to refit the entire kitchen. :grin:

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Itā€™s not about you. Itā€™s about the other driver. The only accident I was ever in was when I was stationary in a small queue of traffic behind a police car on a country road. The police had stopped a van and I was three back from that. There were two cars behind me. We had been like that for maybe 30 seconds and some young driver not paying attention ran very fast into the back of the queue. He side-swiped the two cars behind me and hit my BMW hard on the nearside rear corner. It spun my car 90 degrees anti-clockwise, but his car spun right round hitting me again on the side before pushing me into the hedge. My wife went off to hospital in an ambulance and it was six months before we got the car back again, the repair cost being just below the write-off level.

He was insured and so my insurance company got it all back, but still put up my premium next time although I kept my no-claim bonus. If he hadnā€™t been insured then it would have cost me a lot. Being a perfect driver yourself doesnā€™t help you in situations like that.

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The OP, nick and myself are discussing the pros and cons of protecting NCB.

Whether other people are insured is another matter and not connected.

If the option to protect my bonus is cheap then I may well take it.
Once I chose ā€˜protectedā€™ on a price comparison site and the prices went down - and this was for the bike!
:slightly_smiling_face:

It totally is connected because itā€™s claims that the no claims bonus is about, not whether you caused the accident yourself. If your car is written off by someone, you will need to make a claim.

Itā€™s odd that you canā€™t see that.

Another example - a friend of mine parks his car in the road outside his house. Someone unknown hit it hard and both ends were badly damaged as it was pushed into the car behind. The other driver drove off and the police were never able to discover who it was. My friend has never been in an accident himself, but the claim for this damage was several thousand pounds before the cost of the month or so car hire was taken into account. He was glad he had a protected NCB.

I agree that for Ā£45 this is a no brainer. Remember- itā€™s a ā€œno claimā€, not a ā€œno blameā€ bonus.

Itā€™s worth bearing in mind that ā€˜protectedā€™ NCBs do not protect you from risk based price rises.
If you have had any ā€˜incidentā€™ whatsoever the you may be classed as a greater risk and the premium may rise.

A mate of a mate got a higher premium because he laughingly mentioned heā€™d curbed a wheel the previous weekā€¦

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How did protected no claims have anything to do with the hire car?

Because his insurance company paid for the hire car for him to use while his was being repaired and it didnā€™t affect his NCB because it was protected?

Well, theyā€™d have paid for the hire car anyway, but bumped his premium up if he had no protected NCD.

You receive the same service, all being well, with or without protected NCD. The only difference comes at renewal time. And a hire car will make little or no difference.

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Whatever.

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Thanks for your thoughts.
As I cannot think that I have more than a couple of years safe motoring left in me I couldnā€™t really understand what I was protecting.
I now understand that the claim might not be involved with moving traffic so I will put the expensive bottle of gin back on the shelf and pay up.

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This highlights a fact of which I think many drivers are unaware, assuming that a protected no claims discount means no cost to them - but as you not it does not mean that an increase in premium is avoided. It is a typical insurance company hidden rip-off.

It makes me wonder if protecting the NCD makes any difference at all - if NCD is protected, is the penalty increase in premium for making a claim the same as when it is not protected, or does the insurance company simply load the premium more when protected, to make the same after discount? It would be impossible to tell unless there were two identical drivers with identical claims, one with and the other without protected NCD.

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