Timing Your Car Insurance: The 21-Day Money-Saving Secret

Car insurance premiums follow a predictable pattern, with costs starting high 30 days before coverage begins, dropping to their lowest point 21-23 days before, then climbing back up as the start date approaches. This timing trick can save you nearly 50% on your premium, particularly important for electric vehicles where insurance costs are rapidly increasing.

• Start checking insurance quotes about 30 days before car delivery or renewal
• The optimal window for lowest premiums is 21-23 days before coverage starts
• Quotes for a mid-range car can drop from £1,100 to £600 during this optimal window
• You don't need the registration number to get initial quotes
• Points on your license significantly impact premiums, especially for performance EVs
• One Tesla owner saw premiums jump from £1,200 to £5,000 after getting three points
• Check policy details carefully including betterment clauses and charger coverage
• Avoid double coverage with home insurance that might already cover charging equipment

If you want to order a copy of the book "Electric Cars the Truth Revealed 2026 edition," go to grahamhilltraining.com where you can pay for and download the current e-book. You will then receive the 2026 edition free of charge once it's launched. You can also pre-order the training course, which will be launched in 2026 at a significant discount.

To buy a copy of Electric Cars - The Truth Revealed visit grahamhilltraining.com. If you are interested in sponsoring this podcast or would be interested in working together please visit grahamhilltraining.com/contact

Chapters

• 0:00 Insurance Timing Money-Saving Secret
• 1:39 Home Charging Preparations
• 2:51 The 21-23 Day Insurance Window
• 5:11 Points and Premiums Warning
• 8:27 Policy Details and Coverage Tips
• 10:11 Book Promotion and Closing

Transcript

Hi, Graham Hill, back again, still making a ruckus!. 

This information is going to be brilliant because so many people really don't take this into account and this is a big money saver. It’ll help you also if you've got a petrol or diesel car. It's all about your car insurance and the timing. Be prepared for a money saving expert moment I’m sure Martin Lewis would be proud of this one.

Right, when you take out your car insurance, especially when it's an electric car that you've had on order for maybe a few months and the dealer phones to let you know that the car's due to arrive at the dealer’s in say a month's time. You’ve now got 4 weeks to prepare yourself. 

You will have already checked to see if the power supply to your home is in what’s known as a loop, something we discussed in an earlier podcast. If your property has its electricity supply looped with other properties you will need to be de-looped. This will require the energy supplier providing you with a direct link to the grid rather than via a supply that is daisy chained with your neighbours. Chargers cannot be connected safely if your property is looped. So you need to check with a local qualified installer, very early on, if you’re able to install a charger. 

I should remind you that the cost of taking you out of the loop and providing you with a direct connection to the grid, whilst it doesn’t cost you anything it can take several months to organise. However, the good news is that the number of looped homes is very small. So, the chances are that you’ll be fine.

Moving on, I’ll assume that your charger has either been installed or is on order, that’s of course assuming that you’ll be charging your car at home. If you aren’t then of course this isn’t a problem. You’re now ready for when the car arrives. You may have checked the insurance before placing the order for the car but there’s something else you should know as delivery draws closer. 

You should now start checking on the insurance. There’s a time scale which several of the insurance comparison websites have checked, carrying out thousands of tests. And they found that insurance policy costs start very high at about 4 weeks before the insurance is due to start. The premiums then drop down quite rapidly and then they build up again as you get closer to the time when you take delivery of the car.  

The findings also applied when you come to renew your insurance, so when you know you've got the renewal coming up in about a month's time you should start getting quotes. There’s actually a time scale which you should be very, very aware of and that is 21 to 23 days before delivery or renewal. Some of the insurers vary slightly, but between 21 and 23 days is the optimum period to set your insurance so you should obtain a quote and make sure that you save it.

You can get quotes online and save them. You don't need the registration number of your new car because at that stage, if it's a brand new car, you won't have the registration number anyway as it won't have been issued. And even if they do issue a number, it will only be a pre-issue. It's not actually registered with the DVLA. So, details of the car won’t appear on an insurance search. As you need to get some quotes you can get them with the make and model of car, an estimated cost of the car, which the dealer can give you and your estimated annual mileage. 

 As long as you've got this information you can arrange for quotes. I would suggest that you start at 30 days before the date that you want the insurance to start. When this exercise was carried out by the comparison sites they tended to start getting quotes at 30 days before the insurance was due to start and the figure was up to £1,100 on a mid-range average car. Between 21 and 23 days it had dropped down to £600, that’s £500 pounds off, nearly 50% and then the cost started creeping up again getting close to the original quote of £1,100 just a couple of days before delivery. 

So what you need to do is start at 30 days getting quotes. When you get to around 23 days before the car is due for delivery, then it should hit its lowest figure. You may find that it drops a little bit further at 22 and then 21 days. So, save those quotes and then when you go beyond that and the quotes start to increase, don't bother saving the quotes. Obviously, if you saved your quote, you can go back to that quote once you've got your registration number and confirmed delivery date. You can then confirm the insurance. By doing this you should be able to save around 40% of the premium according to the insurance comparison sites.

You can arrange with the insurer to email you a cover note which you can then forward to the dealership so that they can register the car for you without the need to take out their risky free insurance. I’ll be discussing this later in another podcast. If it's a lease car, just save the quote until closer to the time when you've got the registration number and delivery date, you can then confirm the insurance. 

Far too frequently, customers who lease their cars in particular leave the insurance till a day or two before delivery and end up paying much more than they need to. You won’t need to forward a copy of the covernote to the dealer or the leasing company as the leasing company owns the car and is responsible for supplying proof of insurance in their name in order to get the car registered. As the driver of the car you will need insurance in your name so go through the same process as if you were to own the car and start getting quotes at around 30 days.

If you’re buying the car for cash or financing the car on say HP or PCP the car is registered in your name. In order to register the car before delivery you will need to arrange for a covernote to be sent by the insurer by email to the dealer. The dealer will, in turn, register and tax the car ready for you to collect or have the car delivered. 

So the ideal time to save the quote is 21 to 23 days, and the same applies when it comes to renewals. Very few people are aware of this so they tend to leave quoting till the last minute. Unfortunately, like airline tickets, they start expensive, then they drop down fairly rapidly, then they start increasing and it's not until the last minute when they've got three seats left on the plane and they're selling for £10 or anything to fill the seat. Now, you don't get that final drop with insurance. It just goes down and then it goes up and it stays up. So the thing to do is to make sure you get in early at 21 to 23 days save the quote and make sure you save yourself a lump of money, because with electric cars in particular, the insurance costs are going through the roof. 

A fly in the ointment is points on the licence. Take care not to get points on your licence between quotes and taking out the insurance. Reports have shown that points on your licence, especially for speeding, has a substantial effect on your insurance premium if the car is electric and considered to be performance. The same applies to renewals if you have managed to get 3 points on your licence, in particular for speeding, since you took out the insurance and renewal time. 

In a case reported in the Guardian a Tesla Y driver was first refused a renewal from his existing insurer, Aviva, but finally managed to get cover for £5,000, including finance costs, via Direct Line, up from his original premium the previous year of £1,200. This is particularly a problem with cars that have high performance. We don’t know if this particular car was the standard 2 wheel drive with a 0-60 time of 5.5 seconds or the performance version with a 0-60 of 3.3 seconds. This is another reason why you should check out your insurance early, whether taking it out for the first time or renewing. 

Before checking the quotes I would recommend that you first check out the policy details after noting all of my warnings in the podcast and in the 2026 version of my book, Electric Cars – The Truth Revealed. Check for betterment clauses, windscreen cover, cover for your charger and cable including 3rd party liability etc. Cancelling the policy once you’ve taken it out and beyond the cooling off period can be very costly. 

I would also check the ‘optional extras’ such as no claims discount protection, breakdown assistance, legal cover etc. Most insurers will accept the quote that you saved and simply add a few pounds per month for the extras. What you don’t want is to risk having to go through a complete re-quote resulting in a huge hike in premium.  

I’ll be talking about this separately but I should warn you not to ‘double cover’. For example legal cover, if taken out with your car insurance is different to legal cover that may be included in your contents or home insurance and different to a standalone product aimed at the auto industry.  

Also check to see that you’re not already covered. For example you may be able to cover your lead and charger on your car policy only to find that at least the charger is already covered on your home policy. But be careful, if you have cover on your home policy you may need to advise the insurer before cover is activated. 

So, with escalating electric car insurance costs you need to save as much as possible by using this technique. Okay, that's another one over and done with.

We'll move on to the next insurance podcast next time. I'm only going to come up with another couple. We're not covering everything in the book. I'm just covering a few items that I think are really critical and important for those buying electric cars. There are a few other important things to reveal, but you're going to have to buy the book for those. Thanks for either watching or listening. I'll catch you on the next one. You just saved yourself nearly up to 50% on your car insurance. 

If you want to order a copy of the book, Electric Cars – The Truth Revealed, 2026 edition which will contain all of the information included in these podcasts and more go to grahamhilltraining.com where you can pay for and download the current eBook. You will then receive the 2026 edition, free of charge once it’s launched. 

You can also forward order the training course which will be launched in 2026. If you pre-order the training with the book you will be able to buy it for pennies instead of the hundreds of pounds that we expect to sell the training for when we officially launch. We're also working on a finance section for the book, which should be included in the 2026 edition. We had it in there but taken it back out because there are some updates and things due to the changes in the FCA regulations concerning Consumer Duty right now.

I’ve been Graham Hill and I’m off to make even more of a ruckus. Bye for now.