Many people do try comparison-shopping when looking for car insurance and benefits. Car insurance is so expensive, though, that the 10% or 15% that you may save this way isn't likely to be enough. Buying car insurance for your Vauxhall Astra, doing comparison-shopping, for instance, may save you only £30 or so. You'll need more ways to save. Here are a few tips.

Use a job title tool

Many personal finance websites feature something called a car insurance job title tool. These tools help you get a lower rate by taking advantage of a peculiarity seen in the way insurance companies calculate their risk.

Insurance companies carry detailed statistics about the number of claims they get from people in different professions. Their records may tell them that while they get 500 claims each year from journalists, they only get 450 from artists. Right away, they may decide to offer artists a slightly cheaper rate than journalists.

Insurance companies take their effort categorizing professions based on risk even further. They rank different kinds of journalists and different kinds of artists on the frequency of their insurance claims, too. Since they get more claims from reporters than from journalists, reporters pay 20% more. Professional caterers come in with more claims than cooks or chefs. For this reason, professional caterers pay 8% more than other workers in a restaurant kitchen.

When you fill out the job title field on an insurance comparison form, you need to pay attention to the specific variant of your job that you pick. As long as the variant you pick is a reasonably close description of what you do, you can save between 10% and 20% on your premium, experimenting with different job titles (an additional £30 or so, keeping with the Vauxhall Astra example above). Using a third-party job title checking tool can help you quickly come by the right variant to use for the greatest savings.

When your insurance expires, never automatically renew with the same provider

You may prefer your current insurance provider for a number of good reasons - you may like their friendly help desk or the way they quickly process claims without quibbling. A desire to stay on with your current insurer is no reason to simply click on the auto-renew link in the renewal notice, though.

Many insurers try to take advantage of existing customers by offering them expensive renewal rates, while offering new customers much lower rates for the same product. In their experience, sending out high-priced auto-renew letters works out to be more profitable than sending out quotes that are fairly priced. A large proportion of insurance customers click on auto-renew links without thinking.

If you wish to remain with your insurer, you should do it in a different way. You should use an online insurance price comparison tool first to find the lowest price on the market with any insurer. When you have a quote in hand, you should save a copy of the screen with the quote and call your current insurer asking for a price match. You can offer to send proof of the quote over email.

Often, insurers offer perks and freebies to new customers, but keep them from renewing customers. If this is the case, you can simply approach your insurer as an all-new customer and let your old policy simply expire.

Try adding the name of a more experienced driver to your insurance

If you are a young and inexperienced driver or if you have points on your license for motoring convictions, you could have a very hard time getting reasonably priced insurance. If this is your problem, you should look for a friend or family member whose name you can add to your insurance policy as a second driver. This move can halve your insurance quote.

If getting an experienced driver with a clean record on your policy sends your premium down, it isn't because the insurance companies suddenly have more confidence in your driving abilities. Instead, it just tells the insurance company that it won't be you driving the car all the time. If another person has his name on your car's insurance policy, they assume that he will be driving the car part of the time, too. The less time a person with a poor record drives a car, the cheaper the insurance on his car can be.

Other kinds of name-adding can work, too. Adding the name of a boyfriend or girlfriend to a policy can lower prices, too. Insurance companies see romantic relationships as a sign of stability and responsibility. They believe that people in stable relationships wouldn't want to drive carelessly.