Several Questions on Car Insurance

Hi all, my girlfriend and I are now in the process of getting a second car, and I have a bunch of questions about insurance.... help!! 

So a little background info:

We moved to the UK in 2015. I'm a USC and still on my US license. She is an Italian citizen and on an Italian license.

We bought a car last summer and paid around 700 GBP for insurance, which I believed to be pretty high, but understandable as we have 0 years of no claims and I don't have a UK license. I'm the registered keeper and primary driver of the car, because I need it for work. She's a named driver.

She recently found a job and needs a car for that. We found a car that we're going to buy very soon and started doing insurance quotes on it. When we started, we (obviously??) did it with her as vehicle keeper and primary driver, and me as a named driver. The rates were unbelievable! They were around 1500 GBP, and the car's value is only 2000 GBP. I started playing around with the data and found it to be cheapest to get a multicar policy, which the first car joins when its current insurance expires. However it is MUCH cheaper (several hundred pounds) if I am the keeper and primary driver of both cars, and she's a named driver on both cars.

Then, just to make things more complicated, I phoned the company and asked what will happen when I get my UK license. She said the premium will go up by something like another 600 GBP, because then I suddenly have no driving experience. That made me really angry. She said there was no way to make their system understand that I already had experience and just changed licenses.

My questions:

Why are the quotes for my girlfriend so high? She has had her license for 12 years and is 30 years old. She has no convictions or anything like that. She's both older than me and has had her license longer. It seems like they're straight up discriminating her for having an EU license, which makes no sense to me.

Is there a way of avoiding the premium spiking up when I get my UK license? Is that normal? I thought it would have gone down.....

Is it against the rules for me to be the primary driver on the car that she actually drives more miles on? She would of course be named driver

Thanks for any advice!!!
Max

My UK wife and I moved back to Harrogate last April (after 4 years in the US)....they would not take our driving record from the US. Ouch. But.....being somewhat older (55+58) we paid around £700 through Tesco. I now have my UK license (and have no claims since we got here) so am hoping it will go down a little when we re-new. If not.....we look around for other insurance. Switching insurance seems to be better to do here, and more common.

If it makes you feel any better my husband and I have over 35 years driving experience each, but potentially face being treated as new drivers when we return to the US! It seems stupid that insurance companies won't recognise experience and proof of no claims from other countries. We've bounced around a bit so have had this problem 4 times now, UK-US, US-Malaysia, Malaysia-UK, UK-USA this coming summer. At least our age will be in our favour!

Definitely switch and ditch!  Money supermarket is a good comparison site (among many).

My girlfriend seems to not be the only person who has ever wondered whether they're being discriminated against solely based on the fact that they weren't born in the UK.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2010/mar/16/which-accuses-admiral-insurance-discrimination

I feel like these companies are publicly traded stock corporation versions of shop owners at Turkish bazaars.

Have you looked into how expensive it would be for either of you to get insurance back in the US? My guess is probably a similar amount. When I was a new driver I paid $67 a month on a 73 VW Bug (edit: under my parents' policy). When I switched to a 2003 coupe in 2008 I paid $150 a month when I was 22 on my own policy. After a car accident it went up to $200. It never dropped below $100 a month before I moved here in 2014.

I just have to say, did you see the article is from March 2010? And it was only for Admiral  companies, of which there were 3, that there was the 18% difference. The other companies were the same...

Have you looked into how expensive it would be for either of you to get insurance back in the US? My guess is probably a similar amount. When I was a new driver I paid $67 a month on a 73 VW Bug. When I switched to a 2003 coupe in 2008 I paid $150 a month when I was 23. After a car accident it went up to $200. It never dropped below $100 a month before I moved here in 2014.

I just have to say, did you see the article is from March 2010? And it was only for Admiral  companies, of which there were 3, that there was the 18% difference. The other companies were the same...

Hey,sorry yeah, I saw it was a bit old. I was just venting . But seriously, I'm trying to be as objective as humanly possible, and it makes no sense to me that she would have to pay a higher premium than me. I'm male, I'm younger, I haven't had my license for as long, and mine is only valid for 1 year here wheras her's is valid forever.

Can anyone share their experience with switching the US license to the UK license with the insurer?

I paid a £40 admin fee and my insurance dropped about £60 for the remainder of the policy.

I paid a £40 admin fee and my insurance dropped about £60 for the remainder of the policy.

That sounds a lot better than what the Admiral customer service agent told me on the phone!

Would you mind saying which insurer you had?

Admiral.  They've been great for me.

Admiral.  They've been great for me.

Hmmmmm. Maybe the woman on the phone didn't know what she was talking about! She claimed to have confirmed with her supervisor that my insurance would go up by around 600 pounds just for switching licenses.

Yeah, that doesn't seem right.  I even had a powerful car when I was first insured.

While my UK license was new, I had x number of years driving experience.  To be fair, I did have a UK provisional license when I bought the car and they accepted a letter from my US insurer for no claims.

Our insurance coverage runs from March 10 to March 9, so there was a bit more than a month left when I got my UK license recently.  When my husband called to let them know, we were charged about £50 extra for the remaining period.  Since part of that is an administrative charge we aren't sure what the annual increase would be, but the annual charge was already £271 for both of us when I was using my US license. 

Since this struck us as pretty expensive, my husband did a search on confused.com and he found coverage for the coming year (March to March) for about £180!  My UK license is still brand new, I still have no driving history here, and yet we will be able to get insurance for about £100 less next year than the last one.  I have no idea why the rates vary so much for the same thing, but it is definitely, absolutely, positively worth doing some comparison shopping! 

Becca.....who are you using for insurance?