30 years ago of course very few people have this problem. With only 2 million cars on the roads we all still manage to get from A to B, the unlucky ones crowding onto smelly buses or packed trains, the luckier ones sat astride their Triumph Tiger Cubs or BSA Bantams. The only people who drove a car with the local bookie, the doctor and the shadowy family who sold black-market goods during the war. Most of us couldn't afford a gallon of petrol, let alone a car, and as for the maintenance bills – forget it.

Fast forward to the 21st century and if we cannot afford to buy a 3-D television, mobile phones/computers for all our kids and a designer handbag or two for the wife we consider ourselves to be poor. The car is now an essential status symbol rather than a useful means of transport, so we have no option but to pay the blasted insurance bill.

How to do this though, when the bank account is bare, the wife absolutely has to have a new dress to match the new shoes you bought her last week, and the kids cannot possibly be seen dead in last year's trainers! The answer is, you do what hundreds of thousands of people are now doing; you pay monthly.

Yes indeed, the insurance companies who once upon a time refused point-blank to even consider allowing monthly payments, have finally recognised that if they do not do so their competitors will, and so they will lose business. For this reason, and this reason alone, monthly payment car insurance policies are available; but at a price. The problems are twofold; firstly these insurers have traditionally made all their money by investing the money given to them by other people in advance of something that may, but probably will not, happen. They like to have your money in their bank account, and they much prefer that to seeing it dribble in in drips and drabs. In addition to this, some people in the past have been rather naughty. They have started a no deposit car insurance scheme, paid the first instalment and then not paid any more. In the meanwhile they have had their hands on the insurance certificate that they needed in order to tax the car, after which they have quite happily continued to drive uninsured.

Those days however are well and truly over. Big Brother truly is watching us; dotted all around the country are sneaky little cameras which record our car registration numbers; a quick piece of computer magic and the police car occupants who are lurking further down the road are informed that a car is coming along with your registration number on it and no insurance! So, by your monthly insurance policy by all means; but if you do not wish to pay a few hundred pounds in fines, see your licence taken from you, and have your car taken away and possibly crushed do not even think about going down that particular route.