Car insurance calculator

Modern living means that there are certain unpleasant times of the year; certain annual irritants that arrive with monotonous predictability. This is just a fact of life and if you are a car owner, they are so numerous that you simply have to learn to live with them.

A significant anniversary is that of your car insurance renewal and the usual questions will inevitably abound. Should you shop around for a new policy? Have you the time to telephone around for quotes? How can you compare cover on a like-for-like basis? Which is the most reputable company in the UK? Is a cheap quote necessarily the best value, and how do I compare them? Where do I stand with my no claims discount?

Not so long ago this process really was the stuff of nightmares, hour after endless hour poring through the Yellow Pages and being placed on hold while some toothache-inducing music was pumped into your ears.

Thankfully, the online community has come to the rescue and spared us this ordeal. We now live in the highly efficient and effortless world of online quotes, price comparisons and, central to this revolution, the car insurance calculator.

This type of service has changed the way that insurance companies do business to such an extent that it is difficult to exaggerate their impact. The whole concept of providing quotes and enabling car insurance comparison has been streamlined so perfectly that the best examples of the online car insurance calculator dovetail perfectly with the marketing needs of the industry and the best value requirements of the consumer.

Tedium and frustration when shopping around for quotes should now be a thing of the past – and it certainly can be – but first let’s examine exactly what we mean by ‘car insurance calculator’, because in its most sophisticated incarnation we are talking about a highly specialised piece of software engineering capable of marshalling massive amounts of data, whereas in its more fanciful guise it is merely a crude number cruncher that deals, at best, in ball park figures.

The latter example typically checks out your post code, maybe your age and maybe if you get lucky, the insurance group of the car – but don’t count on it. In practice, you get a figure, it means nothing and you end up back on the phone listening to elevator music.

The genuine article is a different matter entirely. It is what it purports to be – a bespoke, networked, powerful car insurance calculator and it is remarkable to the extent of being a technical marvel. It operates by indexing and sub indexing fixed and variable informational specifics known as parameters.

But we consumers don’t really need to know that.

We need only to know that our age, location, type of cover, policy limitations, gender, driving history, marital status are but a sample of a whole host of other facts, some indeed variable some constant, that affect the cost of our insurance cover – and that a true car insurance calculator is onto it, in detail searching out price comparisons for you to consider.

And happily, there’s no need to place you on hold for that.