AD| A home can be your most valuable investment, and it’s important to protect that investment with home insurance. Insurance can a frustrating thing because it’s a bit of a gamble. You can save you can risk being uninsured, but then you could find yourself in big financial trouble if something does happen to your home. Or you can pay for insurance and not need it – in this case, it feels a bit like you’re paying for nothing. But just remember that it’s much better not to need to claim on your insurance and live with peace of mind that you are covered if something does happen!

What is home insurance for?

Home insurance protects your home and its belongings should something happen. You can be insured against various things, such as fire, theft and flooding, There are two main types of home insurance:

Buildings insurance

This covers any damage to the structure of your home, such as the walls, roof and floors. It sometimes covers fixtures and fittings. Getting buildings insurance is usually a condition on your mortgage. This is the bare minimum you should get, as if something does happen to your home and you don’t have insurance, you’ll have to pay for everything yourself while still paying your mortgage.

Contents insurance

Contents insurance covers your belongings in the event they get damaged or stolen. You can pay a bit more and get cover for your belongings outside of your home, too. Such as for your phone or a laptop.

How do reduce the cost of your home insurance

There are some things you can do to reduce the cost of your insurance. Some of these things may cost you upfront but will provide long term savings, as well as additional security to your home and peace of mind. Here are some things you can consider implementing to save money on your home insurance.

Increase the excess

The excess is the amount you are willing to pay if you make a claim. If you are happy to pay a higher amount, your insurance cost will reduce.

BSI-approved locks

Having BSI-approved locks on your doors and windows will increase the security of your home and your home insurance will be cheaper.

Install alarms

Having both smoke alarms and burglar alarms will protect your home from damage and from theft, so will decrease the cost of our insurance. Make sure you have approved models installed in your home.

Build no-claims discount

We’re all familiar with a no-claims discount for car insurance, but some insurances offer it for home insurance too.

Buy buildings and contacts insurance together

If you get your insurance from the same company, they may offer you a discount. This may also apply to your car insurance, so it’s worth checking if you can save money by taking out all your policies in one place.

Pay upfront

Pay for your insurance altogether rather than monthly, as this can sometimes be around 6% more expensive. Also, it’s always better to get it out of the way rather than have more monthly payments. Once I’ve paid for something like this, I start putting money in a sinking fund for the next year so the money is already there waiting. I also do this for things my car MOT/service and any other costs I know may be expensive!

Use a cashback site

I always check Quidco before I buy anything, especially insurance! I recently got £90 cashback on my car insurance! A lot of insurance companies are on Quidco so it’s worth checking how much cashback you will get.

How to compare care insurance

Now that we know how to keep our home insurance low and know exactly what security measures are already in our home, we can head to Quidco to compare our home insurance. This allows you to compare cheap buildings and contents insurance; You could pay £129 or less for home insurance* and get £28 cashback.

Just hop over to Quidco Compare and fill out the form. It’s so quick to get a quote and you can easily edit any information afterwards. allowing you to switch between annual and monthly or change excess payments.

Once you’re happy with a quote you can buy it! Don’t forget, you will get £28 cashback on top of that! You can also retrieve quotes at a later date.

If you are not using Quidco compare with your insurance, then you’re missing out on saving not only on your policy – but on the cashback.

You can use Quidco compare to save money and get cashback all of the following:

• home insurnace
• car insurance
• pet insurnace
• travel insurance
• van insurance
• motorbike insurnace
• energy
• broadband

Just think how much you could save over the year if you use Quidco compare for each one – would be a nice bit of money to spend at Christmas, wouldn’t it?

*51% of customers received a quote of £129.12 or less for buildings and contents insurance in August 2021 when using Quidco Compare home insurance.