Obtaining insurance quotes offline is a real drag. You can spend hours on the telephone repeating your details to life insurance or household insurance telesales operators in a bid to find the lowest quotes available. It is a time consuming process that requires persistence to keep on phoning insurance agent after insurance agent. You're often in need of an understanding boss too who'll let you use the work phone during your lunch hour!

But, in today's high-tech era there is an easier and much more efficient way of obtaining contents insurance, buildings insurance, car insurance, pet insurance, life insurance and life assurance quotes. All you have to do is log on to the Internet and you'll find a wealth of insurance resources that enable you to receive insurance quotes online at the click of your mouse button.

The last few years has seen a massive increase in the number of businesses establishing an online presence. Amongst those who have taken to the Internet are insurance companies. There is now a flood of insurance companies online, from well-known high street car insurance names to small local life insurance brokers, all of whom are offering information about their insurance products over the Web.

What's more, many of the insurance companies provide links to online quotes forms, making the process of obtaining insurance quotes fast and easy. Insurance companies can in fact hand you competitive quotes instantaneously upon receiving the online form. They can also direct you to the application form so you can apply for the insurance online within minutes.

The best places online to obtain insurance quotes are often not directly with the insurance companies themselves. Instead, those looking for online insurance quotes should head for specialist insurance web sites and portals where a collection of insurance companies can be found on one site. These 'collective' sites offer consumers several advantages.

Firstly, as there are several (if not hundreds) of insurance companies represented on these collective sites, it is much quicker to find the insurance companies from which to obtain your online insurance quotes than when compared to trawling around the Internet looking for each online insurance agents' website. The second advantage to using these sites for collecting your online insurance quotes is that many portals allow you to collect instantaneous online insurance quotes through the use of just one single quotes form! So, instead of going to each insurance agent and re-keying the information needed to obtain your online quotes, you only have to enter the information once, saving you bags of time!

But what about price? Surely, if online insurance quotes are not obtained direct from the insurance (or assurance) agent's website then they'll be more expensive? In fact, the truth is that they won't! Specialist portal sites handle all of the admin and advertising for each insurance agent represented so saving those insurance companies a packet. Therefore, if you go direct to the online insurance companies you are likely to receive the same online prices as you would through specialist portal sites.