Category: Financial Advice

So the car insurance battle continued today with the help of Ziya.

As mentioned in there commercials, Direct Line and NFU are not on the comparison websites, so I rang them this morning. I’m not surprised they aren’t, they both gave me quotes of over £1,500.

Again I don’t see how this is justified when I have had no incident in the last 12 months, well touch wood, for many years.

So looking at the comparison sites, I ended up choosing Hastings Direct, as that came in at £718, so just over a £100 increase.

Yes you expect an increase, that’s just how it is, but NOT by nearly doubling it. It shouldn’t be like this every year, having to hunt around for the best price, it’s as if they don’t want you as a customer.

This morning I received the email I was dreading regarding car insurance, after reading some horror stories throughout the year with the ridiculous increases.

Sure enough, when I logged on to the Tesco portal, the car insurance had gone up from £613 to £1,145. An increase of £532, so not far short of doubling it. How can that be justified?

I haven’t had an incident in the last year. Just complete madness,

I rang them up and all they could get me down to was £938. We are also Tesco club card members which is reducing the cost already.  I said that was still a too bigger jumper and would look around.

It’s down to an increase in accidents and cost to repair electric cars, so I can only see this going up with the goal to move to electric cars.

So with the help of Ziya, I decided to look around.

Look out for a further blog update with the final outcome

After the chancellor autumn statement yesterday afternoon and receiving a document from my financial advisor. I asked if there would be any impact on us.

This was the response I got back –

“The NI cut will help Claire as of January. Should be a decent monthly difference to take home pay.

Savings rates are looking good, with Cash ISAs and Premium Bonds preferable (as tax is starting to touch on people’s earned interest). Largely, with inflation cooling as hoped, interest rates should have peaked, then we’ve seen some a very good turnaround this month for you portfolio (4%ish just during November) helped by some positive comments from the US Federal Reserve backed up by the Bank of England recently. So sentiment seems to have moved a lot and the outlook is improving. Fingers crossed for a better year ahead.”

Hopefully this will be case after a bumpy ride this year with the markets.

Happy to recommend my financial advisor too.

Today I had a financial review and in the most part, everything is going all OK which is all you can ask for with the mess going on around the world.

Recovered from the bad ending to 2022, due to the scare from the mini budget from the shortest rein prime minster.

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This was feedback I had from the market analyst.

“2022 was a dreadful year for the fixed interest market as it suffered record breaking losses caused by the sky rocketing interest rates. We were meaningfully underweight but with hindsight should have been even more aggressive in this position. Now with interest rates appearing to be nearing what is expected to be their peaks we have moved towards a more benchmark neutral position. This repositioning of our asset allocation is behind the purchase of the additional units of Robeco.

Robeco has been our best performing fixed interest collectives’ year to date, performing relatively well because it has been positioned to be less sensitive to increasing interest rates (duration).”

I’ll be honest, I’m still not sure about Robeco, happy to be proven wrong.

This morning I had a review with my financial advisor and market expert.

Considering the last year, my portfolio hasn’t done too bad or too great either, but at least nothing crazy considering everything that is going on in the world.

Hopefully the financial world is now settle after the banking issues earlier this year and the interest rates will start to have an impact in a positive way and we will see the markets grow.

It still makes me wonder about some of the people I used to work with, who are renting and had no pension setup, how they will cope in later life or even now with every going up?

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