Calculating car insurance

When calculating premiums, your insurer will consider personal details like age, sex, and marital status. In fact, they'll analyse your risk profile with the intensity of a crime-solving detective—but instead of looking for fingerprints, they're collecting data on your driving history, credit score, and where you live and park at night.

To get a better idea of how your risk profile is calculated and how it affects your premiums, take a look at our detailed guide: How insurers calculate your risk profile.

There are a couple of things that can add even more to your car insurance premium, such as:

• •The level of coverage: You've chosen, like comprehensive insurance or third-party insurance. You'll find a little explainer here if you're unclear about the difference between these two types of insurance.
• •The age of the car being insured: Do you have a shiny new toy or a skedonk? Older cars are generally cheaper to insure, while newer cars have higher replacement costs, but it's heavily dependent on the cost of repairs and availability of spare parts.
• •Security features: If your car doesn't have an immobiliser, car tracking system, or alarm, it might raise your monthly premiums.

So how do you know if your insurer has given you a fair premium or if they're 'taking you for a ride'? The only way to be sure you're not overpaying is to regularly review your car insurance.

Think about it: over the past year, a lot could have changed—maybe you got married, moved to a different area, or landed a new job that's a lot closer to home. Any one of these could affect your insurance needs (and premiums!) in a good way.

By regularly comparing what you're paying to what else is out there, you can make sure that you have the right protection and policy for the lifestyle you're living now. And just like you might have changed over the past 12 months, you can be sure that the insurance market has too—there might be new products available at more competitive prices.

Remember those call centre agents we mentioned earlier? They're all competing for your business, so why wouldn't you shop around to find the best deal?

And you can forget 40-minute phone calls and requesting quotes from different insurers — who has the time (or the energy!)? Hippo.co.za makes getting and calculating car insurance quotes easier than ever by offering you quotes from leading insurers all in one place. And it will literally only take you two minutes. Easy, right?

We've given you all the bad news about what might affect your premiums, but the good news is that there are a couple of things you can do to reduce your monthly car insurance payments:

• •Buy a car with an alarm system or have one fitted. Then get a tracking device installed and subscribe to the tracking service for a small fee every month.
• •You can opt for a higher excess or deductible amount if you know you can afford a higher payment when you need to claim for repairs or a nasty accident.
• •Having multiple policies, like your car, home contents and cellphone insurance, all covered by one insurer, rather than a few different ones, could mean that you get a better deal.

Use Hippo.co.za to calculate and compare premiums before you buy. No guesswork—just clarity.

Better insights = better savings.