Well i didnt cost my insurance company anything so anything they got was a bonus for them wasnt it. And stop defending insurance companies, sitting there defending multi billion pound companies just makes me want to hand you the worlds smallest violin.

At the end of the day we just did it the cheapest way round possible, as most people would do, i wasnt brought up to pay anymore than is completely neccessary for anything. If insuring it one way comes out at 2k, and doing it another way is 800, its a no brainer which way round you do it.

Yes Bobbin i do advocate fronting as anything which stops insurance companies making money is a brilliant idea in my book. And the fact that at 24 you got cheaper insurance than at 17 despite no driving experience or anything in the meantime (so you couldnt possibly of become a better or worse driver in the interim) shows how deeply flawed the system is anyway. I wouldnt say i lived in the countryside but i was in a place not well served by buses or trains at all, working outside 9-5 wouldve been impossible unless you could afford taxi's and it was a neccessity to get on the road as soon as possible if i wanted to get on with my life and get doing things. I'd personally say im a worse driver now than i was when i was 18, at 18 i'd drive "by the book" as it were, exactly textbook for at least two years before i started to slack off, i suppose everyone is different. The insurance firms idea of an 18 year old is someone who crams 7 mates in the car and crashes into a bridge and puts everyone in hospital, well at that age i didnt really have any friends and loved the car too much to drive it quickly LOL, it was only an Escort but it was mine, and i hated the thought of it even getting scratched, sometimes people would tell me to drive faster, i was "afraid of hurting it" LOL!

And yes the parents should expect high costs, but the moment my parents saw how much cheaper it wouldve been if i was a girl was when they got very angry and that was when my Dad decided he'd insure my car for me, as i said earlier, when you're 18 and getting on the road is all that matters to you, if someone offers to cut your insurance bill by more than half then you take it.

Ive met youngsters who pay so much for their insurance they cant afford to put the petrol in to come to work so they end up selling the car and staying at home on benefits, i just dont agree with charging the lowest earners (typically the young people in most cases) the highest premiums. I think the 40-50 somethings should be paying the most, people who passed their test 30 years ago and would never pass todays gruelling examination, the type who think because there was nothing there yesterday they can pull out without looking today, its those who are the real menace.

Oh honestly Paul you will have to put yourself out to pasture and stop menacing the roads with your terrible driving <wink>

Besides which, on Jamie's calcs you passed when you were 11 so you did well to even reach the pedals ;-)

I can only figger that Jamie nor his parents had owt to loose?

And would expect to be compensated/bailed out by those who "could afford it" if/when the need arose.

Jamie, son, you are coming across as a stupid arrogant selfish young prat.

Does anyone "plan" to have an accident

( & Yes I do realize that some do plan their accidents and claim big)

Hey let none of us bother with insurance, I would be umpteen thousand richer by now in that case

Oh & drive on red diesel, that would have saved me another 20 or 25 k

And I might as well have a wheen of pints as well since I choose to ignore all those other laws.

And never worry about those silly speed limits they are for the rich to obey.

I cant afford to.

jhc!

Edited by dieseldogg on 17/06/2011 at 11:34

In contrast, I think he comes across as an intelligent and eloquent adult, who makes many valid points about the state of the insurance market in Rip-Off Britain.

Is in not time yet for the government to step in and regulate what has become a free-for-all money machine for the big corporates?

Perhaps I have answered my own question there.

If insurance is to work for society it must reflect the risk fairly and equitably, otherwise society will find a way around it.

So parents should stop helping their kids out in order to benefit them in life? What a load of rubbish. Motoring is expensive for young people, and young people tend to earn the lowest wages (if they earn any wage at all) most need their parents help, most parents like mine are happy to do so. The problem is you need the money to learn to drive and buy the car but most employers wont give you a job unless you have a driving licence and a car, so somebody else has to pay for it. Older people of about my parents age were able to leave school at 15 and get a basic job somewhere and earn some money, companies simply dont take on school leavers anymore, some of the latest research shows alot of people dont get their first job until they're early 20s (as alot go into further education now, as its difficult to get taken seriously without qualifications). Most cant get a job because there arent any, when i was doing a recruitment thing at work i had to contact our local job centre and asked how many claimaints they have and how many jobs they have advertised, over 5000 claimants with 246 (i think) jobs available, basic maths tells you that doesnt go, especially as the vast majority of them jobs (i looked) required a driving licence, so youngsters without them are in a difficult position. Companies dont trust young people anymore out of prejudice like what you're exhibiting here, has nothing to do with their parents paying for car insurance, the ones who have a car have a better chance of getting a job, proven fact. Even university graduates go back and do masters because there are no jobs and every b****** has a degree now that a BA is pretty meaningless. When i was 18 i dont remember being asked in a job interview "did your parents buy you your car?". People employing eastern european illegals are another major problem and should be put in prison, dont try and tell me its us who has to do ourselves down, scrape beg borrow and steal in our own country to get given a job ahead of some illegals because they'll build a bridge for ten quid. And there are unique skills involved with employing young people and if your friend doesnt have those then thats his problem.

Youngsters cant get work because their parents help them pay to learn to drive and get a car. Thats a new one on me. I'll keep hold of that. Nothing to do with economic meltdown, Tories scrapping future jobs fund, Tories cutting most help for young people, employers having the pick of the world to choose from (when 90 experienced people apply, what chance do the 10 kids have?) nothing to do with increased transport costs making it impossible for people to travel, nothing to do with employers preferring illegals or eastern europeans instead, nothing to do with employers prejudices against young people.

So long as we all know :)

Edited by jamie745 on 26/06/2011 at 15:57

The economic crisis excuse is a non starter, thats not a good enough reason for putting our young people out of work and handing British jobs off to foreigners, the same foreigners who now f*** off back to Estonia or wherever they've come from because the pound is too weak for them now, leaving our youngsters there with no experience and planks like who you're talking about prejudiced against them. I just dont believe in visitors to the country being head of the que for anything, and i'd expect that to be the case everywhere, i wouldnt expect preferential treatment if i moved abroad. And the previous Government's horrific mistake on the Poles should be justification to leave the EU, they estimated around 100,000 would come it ended up nearer a million, and dont tell me that can happen without negatively affecting the british population. That alone should be justification for shutting the borders.

I dont directly employ people but i am often asked for recommendations and ive personally never found myself recommending the foreign applicants, nothing to do with because of where they come from actually it has to be said but mainly because they tend to not have the skills we look for and nor do we actually get many apply, i get the feeling alot of the immigrent community tend to favour/best suited to/prefer (delete as applicable) the manual work, yes they could build us a wall but thats not what we do. Its more office based, IT stuff so the A level whizzkids computer geeks tend to get the job. This country is more of the IT generation now with our kids wanting to work in "software design" so maybe thats a difference in culture which i could agree with. Very few British kids grow up wanting to build cars or do engineering or anything like that, which is a shame in many ways as its a sector which has almost vanished in this country in recent decades. But when you can become a millionaire out of making a website its easy to see why they're all so keen on computers!

And your comment of "cant do any work unless a vehicle is bought for them" well im afraid mate in alot of cases thats true, we dont all live in the centre of London with a bus every three seconds, if you lived in places like i did as an 18 year old or whatever you were heavily limited to where you could get to, meaning having a car would open your scope up so vastly, the options were either to move, which we couldnt afford, or my parents pay for me to drive and get a car so as i wasnt stuck at home on the dole until i was 35, ultimatley it ended up the right decision, the job i eventually got i wouldnt of been able to get to if it wasnt for having a car, not unless i wanted to walk 2 miles from the nearest bus stop and get there two hours early (which you wouldnt put up with so dont tell me we should have to). Until the more rural areas are well served by public transport, which wont ever happen because trains dont even work in the heat now (the wrong type of heat today apparently, all shut down) it wont improve. Public transport is absolutely useless. Snow, wind, rain, heat, sun, clouds, mildly overcast etc it all shuts down.

In fact public transport outside of London is so horrific where i work its standard policy to not employ anybody who doesnt have their own car, as they cannot be relied upon to get themselves here by public transport, because when we've had people who use trains and buses before, they're late at least twice a week (and we checked the problems with the trains, so i know they were telling the truth) and thats just no good to anybody, no good at all. Of course they could get the earlier one but that'd leave them stuck outside a locked building for an hour in the morning potentially in wind, rain and cold, and we dont pay people enough to put up with that so we cant do that. So it is policy now that even though its an office based job with no driving in most roles involved they must have thier own car to be allowed to apply. And we're not the only place, i can assure you theres plenty which now demand a driving licence even for non-driving roles.

As for your comment of car sharing, in my experience of being a youngster with a car my parents wouldve never allowed that. Paranoia that if you have friends in the car you'll crash etc, i was always told to drive on my own, and im not the only one, parents are protective of their kids and dont want to see them given a raw deal. This is Britain, not Estonia, we dont expect to work ourselves into the ground for £4 a day and a bag of chips, we expect people to pay a proper wage for a proper job and the sooner we pull out of the euro union and stop letting eastern europeans undercut us to then take british money back across the tunnel into the thieving financial parasite which is Europe then this country will be great again. You say our youngsters need backbone to compete with them, im sorry but this is Britain, we shouldnt have to compete with foreigners, why should we have to do ourselves down to their level in order to compete for work in our own country? Wrong mentality im afraid, keep going down that road and this country really will be dead. Hey i hear lots of labour workers in the middle east dont get paid and dont use safety equipment, maybe we should encourage our kids to work for free and in a dangerous environment, y'know, so as they can compete.

We need to reclaim this pleasant land!! This....England!!!!

Edited by jamie745 on 28/06/2011 at 02:52

Flamin' hell J - you on the sauce again mate?

p.s. Estonia is actually quite nice.

Jamie, there's very little we disagree with in principle following your two good posts from the early hours of thismorning.

However that which we hope for, withdrawl from the EU isn't going to happen anytime soon if ever, too many lucrative careers etc at stake.

The facts of the stiuation however remain as they are, the foreign workers are here to stay and they are good workers, things have changed here and the repercussions will be felt for generations to come. Everything is now down to cost, including the public sector and benefit culture, as for cutting those spiralling costs we haven't seen the start yet....though cuts for our own people when we can give £millions we've borrowed to other nuclear heavily armed countries seems an odd way to go on, but there you go, very little politicians of the last 40 years have done was in my name or with my vote.

To get themselves head and shoulders above the competition anyone of any age wanting well paid work will have to convince and prove by references that they are worth employing, by getting a job, any job it doesn't matter what and doing it well, establishing a checkeable history of reliable and hard working honesty.

I quote you from a previous post of yours.

''And there are unique skills involved with employing young people and if your friend doesnt have those then thats his problem''

Two problems here, what unique skills are those pray, he pays a wage he expects reliabilty and work in return, nothing unique there, and secondly it's not his problem, it's theirs, he's paying which means he's the customer, they're selling their labour...the customer is always right.

Some reality checks needed and sharpish, despite what many youngsters have been led to believe not everyone can be a high roller, not getting the high flying roles doesn't mean that normal people can't make a good life for themselves either, it might mean they have to work harder for it though, any job will do to start with, then either work up the ladder or use the experience and resulting work history to get better work, thats how millions of us have got on.

It means not getting drunk every night, never taking drugs of any description, being prepared to work all hours of the day and night, in young mens situations in particular it means growing a pair and becoming a man.

I applaud your principle of giving people a chance, the reality is slightly different sometimes, with huge swathes of people give them an inch and they'll take the yard every time, much is down to attitude.

Gettting back to the car insurance situation, a car is not a right it is a privelidge, what's wrong with riding a bike for a while, it may not look cool and hopefully might mess up a stupid gelled hair cut, but then the dole looks really uncool to me.

Hey at least Jamie is a well balanced individual.

With an equal number of chips on each shoulder.

insurance was then £350 (£632) on a car which cost me £300.

There's a good point too - think about how much the insurance is in comparison to the value of the car. I pay about a seventh of the value of my car, for my insurance. I tested out insurance for a Porsche on Confused or somesuch and got a slightly higher figure, but the number was more like 1/30th the value of the car.