Reply With QuoteWhatever you do, don't become a nun or a musician.
I understand that car insurance companies use your job as part of their price analysis. So which jobs give the lowest insurance? I'm pretty much self employed so I can give my self any job title I want! I've tended to use Technical Director (sounds grand) but are there better jobs for lower insurance?
Cheers.
Whatever you do, don't become a nun or a musician.
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
Well I can maybe see why 'musician' might cause issues (e.g. swimming pools) but a nun? <confused>Originally Posted by seikopath
I've always wondered this too. Isn't this similar to racial profiling or something? It shouldn't be legal.
Many many years ago my dad had quite a large business with company cars and vans. He taught me everything I know about being frugal and we had a family friend in insurance (when you bought insurance from a bloke who smoked at his desk in a shop on the high street) who said that yellow vehicles were the cheapest to insure... Guess what colour the entire fleet was?
That I can understand and accept, even though it's a bit ridiculous, but essentially discriminating about people just because of their profession doesn't seem appropriate these days.
Will be interested to see any advice on this because similarly I am self employed and always wonder what is best to declare.
A bit of the old google brings up some articles about this and some details of bad vs good jobs. However they only seem to mention the top 10 and the bottom 10. I'm surprised there isn't a more complete list somewhere.
The companies do discriminate between different groups based on perceived risk. They used to charge female drivers less (all things being equal) because they cost less in payouts. When that was made illegal due to equality legislation women's premiums rose markedly and men's dipped slightly to equal out.
As for declaring you job, insurance contracts are considered to be made in 'utmost good faith' (uberrimae fidei) and can be voided if a declaration is found to be inaccurate. So whatever title is given it should hold up to the test of 'utmost good faith' or it might come back to bite.
ATB
Jon
Interesting but not really important. No-one’s going to change jobs based on this.
Edit: - Though might be useful to consider why insurance is expensive and improve driving/reduce risk.
Last edited by Kingstepper; 20th June 2018 at 08:52.
The cheapest profession to insure ?...simple ! .. Senior Underwriter
Having worked in Insurance for a good few years it came as no great surprise that certain underwriters had "1 day sales" setting the rates for certain vehicle types, occupations and postcodes etc that just happened to co-incide with the date their policies were due for renewal.
The trick is to make sure you have the same car and renewal date as they do.
In all seriousness certain occupations are a higher risk due to either a higher rate of claims or higher claim cost when they do have an accident. Musicians, actors and anyone involved in the entertainment industry for example.
Fictitious example .. Orlando Bloom gives Johnny Depp a lift from their hotel to the studio's at Pinewood and rear ends the car in front. The cost of the claim for any injuries, loss of earnings and sub-sequential losses would be much higher than if Joe Bloggs and office manager with his work colleague Bill had the same accident suffering the same injuries.
Money Saving Expert website has a job title calculator for exactly this purpose.
I work in IT (yawn) and for me selecting Computer Operator is the cheapest or I should say was the cheapest, have not bothered to go through testing again recently.
Excellent :-)
Looks like I'm now an IT Manager ;-)
Does that actually describe your job though? if not (ie you don't oversee other employees in a IT department) then your insurance can be invalidated. See the post above.
Musicians are always 'Music Teachers' as far as insurance companies are concerned ;-)
It's one of many jobs I have. Also product evaluation, technical support, training manager, purchasing manager, etc.... you name it and I do it! This is what it's like in small company. I also manage the IT. ;-)
I thought anything with the word Teacher was a no no?
Completely anecdotal but funnily enough the handful of advanced (road, not track...) driving instructors I know have very low premiums on what tend to be relatively insurance unfriendly cars, albeit their personal cars, not the ones insured for giving instruction.
'Musician' is a no no. As a 'teacher' my premium is reasonable (£750 pa on a 3 Series 320d M Sport Touring).
Just renewed by car insurance...most expensive year for a long time. Thought was meant to get cheaper with age :D "IT Manager" doing 15k miles pa; mileage seems to really ratchet costs, and Mrs L having a bump this year in her car added to the woe ~690 for year :(
It does seem an antiquated process with all the little questions you feel as if you are being penalised with a different answer.
If your description of your job is not accurate it would probably give them an excuse to not pay out should they be needed. I did read a news story on it a good few years ago and they used it as an excuse.
They have also been known to backdate policy's for a good few years when mistakes have come to light. Sure a member on here experienced this, think it was tony LTF? Might be Wong tho.
No - it simply risk assessment.
If they charged the same for everyone - you would probably complain "why am I paying for teenagers?" "why am I paying the same as the fella with one eye?"
To me, that sounds a lot. I paid considerably less for. 330d touring. (I am not a teacher)
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I'm 43 and the car was brand new. I used all the usual comparison sites and this was the cheapest quote. Are you older than me?
What's age got to do with it? Once you've hit 25
I would think the main factors are :
Amount of ncb
Home postcode
Where car is kept overnight
Any previous driving infringements
Insurance group of vehicle
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
As an aside, it's completely weird, but adding some drivers as named drivers on my policy actually brings my premium down. I once got a refund just for adding a named driver.
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
It can sometimes work like that if the driver added is deemed by their system to be of lower risk than you, the Policyholder - a shared car means the risk is lowered compared to just the Policyholder driving 100% of the time therefore.
Seems a bit weird but (like with the 3 Series chat above) their system will take-in all those question answers & variables - age, claims, job, shoe size, favourite Spice Girl etc. - and compare them against masses of claims statistics to see how they measure-up, and ping out a rated pricing at the other end.
What i find weird is that i have two friends, same age, same sex, same driving history as named drivers. The only difference in paper is that one lives in a total war zone and the other lives somewhere nice. Adding the warzone one takes about twenty quid off my Premium, adding the nice area one adds about fifteen.
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
I think that’s a top tip Martin Lewis (MSE) gives. I tried it once and my premium went up!!
I seem to remember an episode of Top Gear where Clarkson said he'd put his occupation as 'doctor' to lower his premium on a supercar - based on the fact he'd received an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University (or Oxford Poly' as it used to be known).
Who knows?
It'll be a figure churned-out by their IT platform at a specific point in time (the goalposts are always moving, along-with the claims stats they work off).
If those variables were the only ones asked about, then it does indeed appear inconsistent.
Chances are though, there's something there that the system decides it likes more about one than the other.
Even if they are the same age, gender & with identical clean driving records, maybe one has been driving longer, has an occupation deemed lower risk, is married or is a non-smoker etc.
And that's just the information you gave them - beyond that there's a pile of stuff they can pull off various databases from name & address alone. Unbeknownst to you, maybe one has a non-motoring conviction, has made several claims on their home insurance policy, or diligently reported (but not actually claimed for) a time when some unknown has knocked their wing-mirror off.
Maybe the one who lives in a war-zone has a driveway, whereas the other parks on the street. Maybe claims stats show that the otherwise nice area is a hot zone for 'crash for cash' scammers.
Point is, the Insurers carry the can and take the gamble, so it'll be a mathematical calculation, running from computer algorithms, pulling-in information from elsewhere, that they use to best (in their mind) predict the likelihood of a loss, based upon what prior claims stats have proven.
It's a bit like a professional gambler, who knows to look deeper than just the names of the horse & jockey, working the percentages. Many successful professional gamblers rely as much upon mathematical skills & research as they do upon the really obvious stuff.
Also where you keep your car overnight makes a difference, for example it added 5% on for storing in a garage compared to the driveway...
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Apparently that's due to increased fire risk
Good luck everybody. Have a good one.
Theres a huge ratings matrix and job role is only a very small part of it. It's usually constantly updated as and when claims data is updated (which obviously includes job titles, thus increasing/decreasing as appropriate).
Nothing illegal about it, makes perfect sense.
The BBC news site has an article today on savings tips on car insurance.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44483073
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