One month car insurance

The advent of the mobile telephone has, to some extent, brought innovations in its wake that have little or nothing to do with communications.

The industry pretty much invented the concept of ‘pay as you go’ and its flexible nature won the hearts of consumers virtually overnight, trebling the number of phone users in the first year of its introduction and the rest, as we all know, is history.

It is easy to see why it has been such a runaway success. The consumer demands choice these days and thanks to the advent of online marketing, online shopping and online price comparison, the consumer has become a powerful beast indeed.

The car insurance industry is one sector that has responded positively to these changes. There was a time when the industry was steeped in a world of ageing brokers in stuffy offices, and the marketing of the product as well as the service at point of sale could best be summed up in one term: ‘rigid and inflexible’. You were basically buying a contract, and contracts are stifling and restricting – which is why people don’t like them.

Here in the UK, this ‘pay as you go’ concept can now apply to the way you buy your car insurance cover.

One month car insurance is not necessarily a new innovation; it’s just that it was once so troublesome and so irregular that the insurance companies of old regarded it as something you would jolly well have to pay for and dearly. Customer flexibility was after all little more than an infernal nuisance.

Yet now, the consumer empowerment delivered by online car insurance comparison has served to make the whole idea of one month car insurance as close to mainstream as it’s ever going to get.

The idea is neat and simple. You either require a simple one month car insurance policy, and you require it because you know that you are going to need cover for that period of time, thus that is the length of your contract with the insurance company, and they are not going to penalise you simply because it is short.

The second scenario is where the concept of ‘pay as you go’ really kicks in. It is designed for those who have no set idea of the period for which they may require cover, but have no wish to take out a 12-month policy.

It is worth remembering here that the whole archaic idea of cashing in your 12-month policy if it became surplus to requirements was, to say the least, a little weighted against the customer. Essentially, you would lose the entire month in which you cancelled, pay a frequently disproportionate cancellation fee and if you were paying monthly you would often still be liable for the entire 12 months interest. In short, you coughed up dearly for your flippancy.

The beauty of the pay as you go concept as it applies to one month car insurance is that you avoid all this. You simply carry out an online insurance comparison, obtain the most favourable quote, and take out a policy that is effectively open ended. If your minimum period is one month, then your premium will attract a discount and will be therefore be cheap when compared to the price of, say, one day cover which understandably attracts the costs of the increased administration.

When you no longer need it you cancel it, and you won’t be penalised for doing so.

Some companies will even allow you to ‘reignite’ your policy at any time should the need to do so arise.

It’s good to know that some things are changing.