Insurance: What’s the Point?

If you’re like us, you’ve probably had it drilled into you over the years that you ‘need’ insurance to ‘protect you’ against life’s little misfortunes and accidents. 

The principle being that the money one pays into the collective pot on a monthly basis is then used to compensate you for any losses that you may suffer. This compensation is then used to return you to the same state you were in previous to the loss.

Moreover, if you’re like us; you probably only make a claim from the ‘pot’ once in a blue moon when it really matters for fear of paying the toll of ever increasing premiums in the future.

That’s how I see it anyway!

Rip Off Merchants

Secretly, being the cynical sort of bloke that I am; I’ve harboured the opinion for many a year now that the whole insurance industry is one big scam with the cards stacked firmly in the favour of the financiers whom issue contracts and terms stacked to the gills with enough ‘get our of jail-free’ cards to make Tony Hayward jealous.

This opinion is fuelled by observations of friends and families over the years who’ve suffered some sort of loss whether it be something to do with their car, a flooded house or injuries of varying severity to their bodies; and as such have made claims against their insurance people in the optimistic hope that they would be financially reinstated to their prior state.

However in all cases, I’ve observed that the insurance company doesn’t exactly come over as enthusiastic or keen to pay-out or make the ‘reinstatement’ process back to normality simple, smooth or easy.

By way of an example; a recent case of a friend of ours, came home from holiday last January to find his house flooded which warranted their house uninhabiatble. He and his family, in the last few days, have only just moved back into their house. That’s nearly a year of living in a combination of hotels and rented houses.

Why? Because their insurance company was fine tuning it’s skills in ‘fucking about’. So much for not ‘making a drama out of a crisis‘ as the slogan used to go.

What a load of old tosh!

Back to the Point

However, I’m deviating from the point here I think.

Readers of this blog will no doubt be following the course of events following the arson attack on our caravan and two family cars earlier this month.

We’re now at the stage where the caravan insurance people have made us an offer on our caravan, an Elddis Gulfstream Ex2000 (2000 model), which we bought used about 3 years ago for £6K.

This model and age of caravan, from what we can establish by trawling the web, can be replaced today at a cost of between £3995 in a private sale for a van with some damage through to about £4995 forecourt price for a van in the same excellent condition as ours.

So what does the insurance offer us? £3400

Whaaaat? £3.4K?

Attempts to negotiate this have proved unsuccessful with our ‘protectors’ citing Glass’s Guide as their basis for valuation.

But hang on a mo! Glass’s Guide is all very well and good, but it doesn’t get us a replacement van of equivalent retail value i.e. what we have to pay to get us back to the same state we were in before the fire.

As such, despite having insurance, we’re still going to be out of pocket.

So as the subject of this post suggests: What’s the point of having insurance if one is going to be out of pocket by quite a large margin following an event that wasn’t our fault.

What a rip off!

Tags: Insurance