You won’t find me taking cover this Christmas
THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH - 7TH DECEMBER 2003
Around this time of ear, opportunistic insurers start urging us to shell out for extra cover on Christmas presents.
The idea is that we buy each other such expensive presents that we will be underinsured if a passing burglar takes a fancy to the gifts piled under the tree.
Quite frankly, if a burglar walks off with the collection of books, toys and CDs normally piled under our tree, I will have no compunction in claiming on our existing policy. Unless your family has bought the entire contents of Curry’s, I’d ignore the message and get on with the Christmas shopping.
Anyway, with curious timing, a company called Weddingplan has just sent out a press release headed “85 per cent fail to insure their most important day, says wedding specialist”. It relates the tale of a £14,000 claim by a bride who fell ill and had to cancel her big day.
What next? Picnic insurance? (“Top-of-the range Merc, loaded with champagne, camcorders and jewellery worth £25,000 falls off cliff…”). Insurance against Halloween rage? (“Fifty self-employed trick or treaters in expensive fancy dress hospitalised…”).
It used to be possible to insure yourself against a virgin birth or abduction by aliens. But at least the Lloyd’s broker marketing the product had the grace to admit that most of the £100 policies were sold as gifts.
Meanwhile, Which? Magazine is warning about the high costs of taking out pet insurance. I have always, probably unfairly, put pet insurance in the same category as the above.
As the Today programme discussed the Which? Report last Thursday, one of my adolescent cats careered through the cap flap, shot on to the work-surface, collided with the kettle and crashed into a rubbish bin full of cans and bottles. He emerged unscathed. Earlier that morning, his brother got out in the nick of time from under a heavy table lamp as he sent it crashing to the floor.
Going by experience, both will almost certainly reach old age without ever costing more in veterinary treatment than the up-to-£5,000 estimated by Which? As the likely cost of a lifetime’s premiums for the bog-standard cat or dog.
Pet insurance has its place. If the cats were exposed to traffic, I might feel differently. But, when looking at any type of insurance, you should always consider the odds, rather than being frightened into parting with extra cash by awful tales related by not-exactly-unbiased insurers of ruined Christmases or disastrous weddings – or even crippled pets.
They would say that
The Government is about to change the official basis on which inflation is calculated. It is switching from an index called the RPIX (the retail prices index excluding mortgage interest) to the European harmonised index of consumer prices (HICP).
The differences are complex, but all we really need to know is that the HICP is a lot lower than the RPIX (which, if nothing else, demonstrates how little the official inflation figure has to do with the changes in the amount we, as individuals, have to pay in our everyday lives).
A couple of years ago, Saga calculated that the cost of living for elderly people was a lot higher than for the general population because they had completely different spending patterns, for instance.
The change may, however, have an impact on pensions, wages, savings and all other areas where increases are linked to inflation.
The Government says they’ll remain on the RPI, but Mandy Rice-Davies had a phrase for that.
