The annual painfest has begun once again. The insurance broker has almost doubled the price of last year's quote, hence me looking on-line, but to little joy so far 🙁

I've just spent HOURS typing details into sites to find reasonable value home insurance and found nothing helpful at all – one site checked SIXTY insurers and couldn't find a single quote, either because we have too many high value bikes or because Mrs NBT works from home

It's the latter that's the sticking point I think – the options given are
[list][*]no business use[/*]
[*]regular business visitors[/*]
[*]light clerical use[/*]
[*]other business use[/*][/list]

Well, Mrs NBT makes curtains and handbags in a workroom : so it's not clerical work, but we don't have clients coming to the house, so it's not "regular business visitors", which leaves us with "other business use". We're not even particularly looking for insurance cover for the business, as there's minimal stock at any moment – we just don't want to have any claims refused as we didn't mention the fact that Mrs NBT works from home.

Any suggestions folks? I'm sure there are some of you out there who are insurance brokers, or who work from home and have a similar situation. If I can't find anything then we'll have to bite the bullet and pay the higher premium from the broker, but I'm hoping STW will come up trumps!

I work for a commercial broker that have a few 'working from home' schemes. Drop me your contact using email in profile and can give you a buzz tomorrow.

M&S? Bikes in 'unspecified items up to 5k' so you don't need to mention them. They didn't have any problems insuring Katie who works in a similar way.

When looking at home workers the insurance companies are only really worried about having people at the house and them stealing stuff. No customer visits and delivery to the door comes in the same category as you working from home one day a week. Actually it should bring rates down as the house is nearly always occupied.

Bikes are the awkward thing as they can really bump things up. You could try leaving off the home working and then call to amend when you get the policy documents through – that way you get the 'web price' (20% discount with M&S i think) but get to discuss the amendments to the policy with a human.

we were with m&s previously but last year they decided not to cover home working 🙁

That's worrying. We should check ours.

We're with M&S, they cover the bikes and no problems with the home working, as its just for 'admin'.

No visitors obviously.

Also if the insurance is high due to the business, put the costs on the business.

admin would be fine, but Mrs NBT makes curtains so no go. M&S would have been fine had we just renewed but I cancelled and tried to opena new policy as it;s uusally half the price (like £580 renewal or £300 to set up a new one). Sadly I didn't find out about the lack of cover for home working until after I'd cancelled…