Closing Bell: Sticks Return to the Mud (BAC, COGT, MMM, CSCO, HPQ, BUD, NFLX, GOOG)

Having just bought a motorhome, the past few days have been primarily spent navigating the maze that is the world of insurance. With my efforts and those of my virtual assistant Louise, at least 15-20 man-hours have been spent on the problem, so I thought I’d summarise our findings.

Firstly: Insurance is an absolute bastard when you’re different. This is, of course, no particular revelation, but I hadn’t realised the magnitude of the bastardness.We started with an article I found on Australian motorhomers travelling in Europe, which discussed just how tricky insurance is for us. It mentioned Downunder Insurance as one very expensive but available option, but left us with no other options. We were aware of the weird dealer ‘leaseback’ thing for buying in Europe, where the dealer registers and insures the van in their name, having leased the van back from the buyer, and then sub-leasing it back. Dodgy and leaves us vulnerable to dealer shenanigans.

I didn’t want to admit defeat there, so: Louise trawled websites of insurers with our situation in mind, and for the first pass, concluded that the original article was basically spot on, and that no one would be willing to help us aside from Downunder. The main problems were that most insurance companies only support actual use of a motorhome for about 90 days in a year (useless for ‘fulltimers’), and that UK residency is required.

The latter residency problem was a slightly vague limitation, so I dug a little deeper, assisted by advice from Steve, the dealer we bought our motorhome from, who suggested that getting British licences may help. Louise heard that registration with a UK doctor can make a big difference, something which didn’t turn out to lead anywhere, so I moved on.

I spent a few hours on the phone; It turned out we could get British licences, within 15 days or so. I spoke to one insurer, Coversure, who were happy to keep talking to me after I said I’d recently moved to the UK and was about to get a British licence. They wouldn’t give us more than 60 days of cover in a year, so it didn’t lead anywhere, but it was promising. If I could find an insurer who would similarly accept us and offer 365 days/year cover, we’d be set.

More time on the phone, with lots of no’s, and I was thrilled to find Safeguard insurance, who would cover us for 365 days, as long as we had Brit licences, and were enrolled to vote. I had a niggling feeling about the feasibility of the latter and so felt very smug when I discovered that, in fact, Australians, as Commonwealth citizens, are entitled to enrol to vote immediately upon settlement in the UK! We picked up the paperwork with no troubles, and found out that as long as we got licences and enrolled within 30 days, we could take out an insurance policy with Coversure immediately!

So, I called up and started the application process, which went smoothly until everything went downhill, and Coversure decided that no, actually, they wouldn’t help. It turns out the size of our motorhome is a mite bigger than they will happily insure us for. Wish they’d thought of that before we ran around town collecting forms.

At this point I was fairly desperate, so I asked a few more questions of Coversure, and found out that our recently-arrivedness was the problem – when they put ‘lived in UK 1 year’ into the computer, it said yes.

So, anyway, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, I reluctantly called up Downunder insurance, and forked over £840 (about $1750 AUD) for a year of comprehensive insurance. If we don’t have some kind of major catastrophe that costs a few million to fix, I’ll be very upset.

Next year, I’ll call up Coversure. Till then, we’ll get Brit licences ASAP, so we can say we’ve held them for a full year next time.

I wish I had better news for fellow travellers, but it looks like the insurance world doesn’t like us very much!
Motorhome Insurance