Sir, – My 31-year-old daughter is an artist. She has worked in other industries for many years and has now had the courage of her convictions to follow her heart. Her car insurance is up for renewal. I offered my help with the online quotation work and to my horror I discovered that some of the insurance companies refused to quote her. Why? She has four years of no claims. Sorry, we are not at liberty to disclose the reasons for refusing to quote, I was told. I tried another company and got the same response. So I decided to make her a nurse rather than an artist and – hey presto! – Its4women would now quote me a very competitive rate. Liberty Insurance were now also happy to quote me. I then tried many different professions with the same car and got the following results: artist – uninsurable: unemployed – €1,043; nurse – €640; student – €653; mature student – €629; and software engineer – €522.
There is a happy resolution to this problem since Axa was happy to quote for my daughter as an artist and, joy of joys, there was a contact phone number on the top right-hand corner of the web-page where you could talk to a real live human if you wanted to. I got the quote online, and 10 minutes later I got a call from a lovely human asking if I needed any more help and would I like a discount. – Yours, etc,
DES CULLEN,
Dublin 2.