I'm in the process of getting an iPhone 4S and was thinking of buying insurance as well.

Can anyone recommend me any companies/banks?

Thanks.

Natwest silver account

European travel insurance
Mobile phone insurance
Love film 3 films per month
5 HMV music downloads per month
Free credit check
Fraud protection

£8 per month the lot. Love film is normally £5.99 per month alone

If you have home contents insurance is may be cheaper putting it on that

Don't know who natwest use for their mobile phone insurance, but when i looked into using the company that Lloyds use (Lifestyle Services Group), i was quickly put off by all the negative feedback.

There's a £100 excess I believe on the natwest account too. I've looked at it in the past but the excess on my home contents is a lot less

http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews66225.html

http://citywire.co.uk/money/banks-do...claims/a463467

You do get what you pay for, if you pay slightly more or get the network insurance you do get better cover. However the NatWest might be all you need IF you are willing to pay the £100 excess and acknowledge not everything is covered.

Personally I don't see the point in paying insurance on items that are small like phones. If you save the money you would have paid on insurances then within 5 years it would have paid for a replacement.

So always save your money and over many years it'll always even out and you'll be in profit.

Become your own insurance company for smaller or reasonable cost items - they make profit at it!, you will too over long period unless you really are accident prone like crazy.

Of course this relies on you being able to shell out the money for replacement, but just put the money you would have paid on insurance into a savings account.

Not necessarily. Having not lost a phone in over 2 years (24x6.99=168), earlier this year, I lost, then had my desire stolen, so have made 2 claims for a £300 handset within in a few months. Insurance paid out, but even one claim would not have covered a replacement.

Ok you carry on paying £7 for the rest of your life then (over £4,000) just to replace maybe 3 or 4 phones, which is probably the average of phones people lose or have stolen in a lifetime. The insurance company will make more than 50% profit, unless as I said you are much more accident prone than the average person, in which case you'd want to have insurance.

How do you think insurance companies make money? they make it because on relatively small replaceable items like this where it's optional people pay them twice as much as they claim back on average.

By not insuring things that you could afford to replace out of your own money you are paying that necessary, it's basic logic.

The only exceptions are 1) if you can't afford to replace it and money it very tight, but the item is absolutely essential 2) if you are much more accident prone than the average person.

I'm my own insurance company when it comes to fairly replaceable items, it also makes you a bit more careful with your items too. Haven't made a claim on 'Thine Wonk's mobile phone insurance' now for 10 years, net result = £840 in profit, could replace 2 phones now in the unlikely event that I needed to.

Also the 'payout' money if you consider depreciation and the fact that you might have been going to upgrade or buy a new one at some point soon can all come into it.

It's not just loss and theft though. It's accidental damage too. I'm not accident prone, and I had to have my iPhone 3GS replaced 3 times on insurance over the two and a half years I had it.

Total cost of insurance premiums and excesses was about £400. Total cost of replacing the handset 3 times would have been around £1300.

It's down to individual preferences obviously, but I'd rather be £400 down and call it quits than be £1300 down and hoping I recover that over the next 50 to 60 years.

3 times in less than 3 years, sorry but you are accident prone. That's over 6 times more than the average, for somebody like you I would recommend insurance.

No, I'm not accident prone. I never said all three claims were for accidental damage.

And what is is 'average' you speak of? I'm not aware of any studies of how many people have had phones lost / stolen / damaged in their lives?

Well if they can charge as little as £7 a month for insurance then surely that means that MOST people don't claim for many years, otherwise they couldn't charge £7 a month, it would much more.

Also remember the excess and the fact that NatWest and others will only pay out twice per year, that's in their T&Cs.

In a white paper I'll link to they quoted the British Crime survey which said that 16 per cent of people reported that they had lost their mobile phone and a further six per cent had it stolen. That's not per year, that's EVER.

So for you to make 3 claims in less than 3 years you are VERY much out of the ordinary and one of the group that I would recommend insurance for being in the extremely different to the norm group.

This is a good link on Money Saving Expert which mentions "self insuring" and how because mobile phone insurance is 'one size fits all' with no price change based on age, claim history etc, that the average person subsidises what they call 'serial phone losers'.

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ins...e-insurance#do

There's no data in that report at all regarding how many times people have been victims, so when you were referring to my claims being 6 times over the 'average' you had in fact arbitrarily picked a number and declared it the average all by yourself it seems.

That's an interesting report I'll grant you, but sample sizes of 200 to 400 for each age group are nowhere enough to give a reliable picture of the national trends.

The report says less than 1/4 if people have either lost or stolen their phone. Why argue about it, repeat victims, yes that might have a small bearing, but it's unlikely to make much difference is it.

Obviously you are waaayyyy over average otherwise very very simple basic economics would show you that they couldn't afford to charge £7 a month for it.

As I say this article explains it very well for anyone else on the forum that is considering phone insurance. It helps people think logically and decide what kind of person the are and whether they could save a large sum of money over time.

http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/ins...e-insurance#do