By now I think most people thought we would be out of the recession but it seems to UK is to be left behind stuck in the recession while countries like Germany and France begin to recover.  The UK economy has shrunk again, something that is completely unexpected.

I was hoping for something a bit more positive, something to us think that possibly there will be a lot more jobs being made for people soon instead we find that levels of unemployed have further increased.  With things continuing to worsen we are to be hit again financially, but this time by our cars.  I have just renewed my road tax for my car and I was shocked when I got the letter.  I remembered last year being about £120 so expected something a little higher, maybe £125 to 130, but it was £150!!

Not only that, but insurance premiums are set to increase by 14% in 2009.  My insurance premium is around £350 which I don’t think that is too bad but that is with shopping around a lot and I have 5 years no claims bonus.  Car insurance news is bad for the number of people driving on the road with no insurance, earlier on the year I talked about how there were more people on the road that were uninsured, it is only going to increase.

Why is our insurance increasing, I think it is probably due to the increase in the amount of insurance fraud going on.  With people getting more desperate for money there are people who will crash your car if you pay them so that you can make fake injury claims.  The problem with injury claims are that it is very easy to claim for whiplash when nothing is actually wrong as it is very difficult to medically prove.  I do not agree with it but I do know some people who have been in legitimate crashes but tried to  get as much compensation as possible for whiplash when nothing was wrong, but to pay someone to crash your car is a little bit extreme.