sprostoni's activity

Well...............very fortunately(?) I have NEVER (in 40+ years) needed to claim on any house or car insurance. Arriving here in Italy (very naive, not speaking the language etc etc)............bought a car, had it insured through RSA. One year later at renewal time I received a letter from said insurers which I understood (my fault!) to mean that I had to let them know if I didn't want to renew. Due to linguistic difficulties, I decided (about 10 days before the renewal date) to go their office and tell them that I didn't want to renew. The reply was along the lines of ' your are contractually required to renew because you should have told us IN WRITING two weeks before the due date '. WAS I NOT HAPPY !!!!!! So...........I renewed.................grrrrr! I made sure that I didn't get caught out on that one the following year by having the lady at the brokers write the next years cancellation letter there and then. I thought this would therefore allow me to leisurely decide who to go with a year later. As it happened, (and with my grasp of the Italian language and the systems here having improved a little)...........A week or so before renewal date, I went back to the same broker and asked for a price to renew................The price had gone UP 300euros(!!!!), because I would be treated as a new customer due to the fact that I had cancelled in writing a year earlier !!! Absolutely mad crazy !! If I had had the language skills that I thought would have been needed, I would have written to the Head Office of RSA here in Italy and told them that they were letting circa 1,000 euros slip through their hands to a competitor. Sadly I was unable to do take this on. So the lock-in on insurance policies does exist, but there is a get out if you can understand it.......... In my second year of living here I ended up with TWO house insurances due to a similar lock-in clause. Over my three years of living here, the insurances side of things has been far the worst. I will look at the comparison site next year for sure. S

We have a full pool and have to say, a smaller splash pool would MORE than suffice. A full sized pool costs circa £1,000 per year just for 4/5 months of comfortable (to us) splashing/swimming. S

Well.............the way you drive , you got lucky !!! S

It is just getting cooler so I have prepped our stufas in readiness; I suspect another week or two will be their first lighting of the season, although we are going to burn some money using the gas central heating this year (I might come back here asking for a loan !!!). We are still in our lightish clothing. Our bombola is still 30% full so maybe next week we get that refilled...........I'm not sure though what current gas prices are? S

I've had both of ours done (ZERO mess !!!!) by the chap from Falerone. I'll be having them done every year from now on. S

I FULLY understand bunterboy......!!  I think it may be useful if the administrators made the'search' facility MUCH more prominent. This particular subject has been absolutely battered to death here. There will be updates obviously, changing grants and the like..............but a simple search would find the absolute wealth of information on this topic from the last few WEEKS..............pretty up to date! I have just keyed in 'heating' into the search facility and it has brought up all of the recent (and lots more) information on this subject....................doh!!! S

I have to say there are some keen and VERY knowledgeable players with this one..............I'll stick with my earlier comment (and others from years gone by)............RISKY business, pay NOW, go into (for me) seriously unwanted debt and you MIGHT save money 15 years down the road (if the 'systems' don't change during that time!). Pazzo, pazzo, pazzo....................!! Why on earth would you go down that route?? Good luck for those who do venture this way. S

I looked at this a year or so ago and felt that ALL of the risk was more than I felt justifiable. Good luck ! S

I have sent/received 15/20 to date (so not a regular activity!). But, I always respond, I do not always get a response though. There may be an issue whereby some posters don't know that they have received a 'pm'. The message area isn't a 'bright lights' area so maybe messages can be missed? I think even a 'no thanks I don't want to comment anymore' pm would close the loop? S

I'm sorry that here we are in 'sunny' Italy and we are sadly a bit behind a lot of the world with accessing the Internet in terms of bandwidth. We will get there...........eventually(2/5 years ?) but unfortunately a great majority of the 'age-ing' population here aren't requirening it, so therefore little demand means little 'profits' for the suppliers. I'm sure in the next few years we will catch up (a bit !). S