I’m buying a new Triumph Bonneville and have managed to find a reasonable premium (Hastings Direct) for either Third Party Fire and Theft, or Comprehensive.
I’m trying to work out which is going to be the better option for me.
The Comprehensive is £300 more
The excess is £300 (on both)
So if I make a claim it would have to be for £600+ to make it worthwhile to have comprehensive. What are the chances of having a cost like that? What damage would I need to do? If I did that amount of damage, would I be close to having written the bike off?
The bike is worth £5700, and it would have 2 years of warranty.
Any advice?
My gut feeling is to go with TPFT but if anyone has ideas that I may be likely to claim that’d be handy.
No brainer - If you can afford it, always go comprehensive unless it is really expensive and would not give a good return.
The important difference is that whatever happens, your insurer will pay out to you. You will get the bills paid up front and not have to wait years to resolve a simple accident as the insurer knows that even if you are to blame, they will be liable for your loses and will only run up costs by delay. Instead they tend to pay to repair vehicles etc and then argue with the other insurer about liability later.
If you are third party, you are on your own as far as your losses re concerned. The insurer is only liable if you are found to blame, and only liable for the losses of the other party.
It depends on whether you plan on crashing by yourself and if you do, how much you’d have to spend to fix the bike. On my bike the premium was something like £300 extra and there is a £300 excess so all in all it’d be cheaper for me to get a new bike by myself than insure it so I’m just 3rd party.
I’d go with the Full Comp. for all of the reasons stated.
Worth a check. If you’ve got any finance on the purchase, you probably don’t have a choice, they will mostly demand F.C.
Even if they don’t, your still liable to keep paying for the bike even if you write it off, so you could be paying for the pleasure of not having a bike if the worst happens.
If you can afford it go fully comp - I was third party for years because i was skint - last couple of years been fully comp - which coincided with me getting knocked of the bike - means i get automatic legal representation etc etc and other stuff which has made things easier.
In reality you’d need to be claiming over a grand to make it worthwhile, as by claiming you’ll firstly lose out on earning your no-claims bonus, which would mean you won’t get a discount for the following year & hence a reduced discount for the following couple of years until you catch up. Also, as you’ll have made a claim they’ll then double whammy you by loading your premium on the grounds that you’ve claimed, this will continue to load your premium for the next 3-5 years.
If it`s a new (or newish bike ) i think you should bite the bullet and go for the fully comp,its peace of mind if something does happen and your safe in the knowledge that your pride and joy will be replaced with the minimum of fuss , if god forbid something does happen.
I always think to myself there must be a calculator for working thsi stuff out, especially for cheaper bikes. Say you have xxx bike worth £1000-1500 and your excess is £300, there’s basically no point in FC at £500 year vs £100 TPFT for example. Apply a sliding scale of bike value, excess, and likely premium increase vs FC or TPFT and you can usually work out what’s best for you. What I’d like to see is someone with serious mathematical algorithim power do it for me in a handy calculator format. Go forth.
