To think there is no point in most insurance and it's largely a scam?

[pinotnow]

I've just come back from a holiday on which one of the dc damaged one of their gadgets in a careless accident - think knocking it off a table, so not something utterly ridiculous like throwing it. I've just checked our insurance in the hope it might be covered as I know I paid a bit extra for gadget cover. By the time you go through all the exclusions this really amounts to burglary cover as the only type of loss covered is if someone forcefully entered the locked property and took it! That's not really loss, is it?

Although it's called loss or accident, the definition of accident is nowhere near the standard. I mean I expected things like following the manufacture's instructions and not using it in water, for example. But it mentions they won't cover any damage caused by negligence, which I assume covers pretty much anything that would normally be considered an accident. As I said, loss just seems to mean if it's stolen from a locked property.

What a waste of money! It was a mid-price product, not the cheapest at all. Obviously I know you should read all this stuff beforehand. In future I'll just see travel insurance as to be used if someone is seriously ill, injured, or worse.

Basically it seems you need to pay s fortune to have insurance that actually covers stuff and the people who can afford this could probably easily afford the replace their items anyway. Or have I misunderstood?

I would always have car insurance it is an offence not to. I also have contents and buildings insurance and pet insurance. When I go abroad I always have travel insurance, you'd be silly not to. We don't have life insurance, our children have left home and we have enough money to pay for our funerals and we own our house outright. I don't have any separate insurance for our phones or iPads etc. They aren't worth that much and are probably covered by house insurance any way.

I have buildings and contents insurance with a very well known insurer (think telephone symbol). Part of our insurance includes home emergency cover. This includes 'the breakdown of your main heating system'. One very cold Bank Holiday weekend our boiler broke on the Friday night. I rang insurers on Saturday morning to get an emergency plumber under the policy. My request was declined. The agency dealing with my claim couldn't point to the clause in the policy which made me ineligible for the claim but the computer said 'no'. Eventually having referred on to the main insurers they finally found the clause hidden near the end of the policy in small print under exclusions. I was not covered because I have oil central heating. If it had been gas I would have been. We live in a large village with no mains gas! To say I was cross because the cover clearly stated 'main heating system' was an understatement. We had a very chilly weekend.

There's a reason why they say 'always read the small print!'

I have no house insurance!

very hard and expensive to get it as my home is stone built 1700s with four foot thick walls - they don’t make ‘em like that any more 😀proper thick slate roof - would take a hurricane to take those off.

we are high up so no flooding.

crime practically unheard of here - esp no break-ins.

i do however pay £50 a month for my dog…

Yes they will wriggle out of paying you any way they can.
So if you are involved in a car accident abroad they will not pay out if you didn’t mention that you saw the doctor for a patch of eczema five years ago.

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We've just hit the day number to officially lodge claim with airline who will apparently actively track for 35 days and after that class it as lost. So I guess officially it's delayed but let's be honest, it's been in the system since end of July so probably lost!

Crossing fingers madly but at the point where we're now having to replace stuff regardless (styling tools, chargers that kind of thing).

Your post gives me a glimmer of hope

I pay £90 per month for my dog's insurance. This month they'll pay out £200 for medication, £650 for an ear flush and at least £145 because a heart murmur was detected during the ear flush, so he has to go to a specialist hospital.

Keep all the receipts, make sure you fill in the form as instructed. The airline were dicks but they did pay out. (No compensation for stress and inconvenience though).

Also, although the max (per person) will apply it doesn't matter if your stuff was used. You're having to pay what you're having to pay to replace. Check out MSE etc for tips.

Then use insurance for whatever you can't get covered from the airline if it's worth the excess.

Keep all the receipts, make sure you fill in the form as instructed. The airline were dicks but they did pay out. (No compensation for stress and inconvenience though).

Also, although the max (per person) will apply it doesn't matter if your stuff was used. You're having to pay what you're having to pay to replace. Check out MSE etc for tips.

Then use insurance for whatever you can't get covered from the airline if it's worth the excess.

I tend to agree.

For the legally obligated stuff, like car / property etc, I do it grudgingly. For most other things I keep a couple of very high value credit cards in the freezer and deal with it on an as needed basis.

For around £50, madness!

I don't bother with it. My mum had her whole caravan stolen off the driveway with all her stuff inside and they said she couldn't claim for the contents because the caravan door was locked "she couldn't prove her stuff wasn't still locked IN the caravan"...

Your policy is shit. Mine covers pretty much anything. It's with MoreThan

Oh FFS!!! They are scammers basically… your poor Mum!

I think that travel insurance is the biggest problem - I haven't often had to ever claim on insurance, but the only time I had problems was travel insurance. I am disabled, and I specifically bought travel insurance based on my disability (which costs more, obviously). No problem with that. But one time the plane / airport totally wrote off my walking aid on the way out. The insurance said that they didn't insure disability aids (although there was no specific exclusion) despite the fact that the policy was for people with disabilities and my poor mobility and walking aid were listed on the quote / policy! After two months of arguing with them they offered half of the amount to replace it as a "goodwill gesture". I hadn't any goodwill left though and said I was going to the ombudsman and the press. They settled. But it was barely worth the stress to get the full £320.

I think travel insurance is the one that everyone says "you must have" but actually has so many exclusions that it's a total rip off in many aspects.

I stopped taking out any of these types of insurance policy (so only have medical & cancellation for travel, house and car insurance) when I had a mobile phone policy back in the day that included ‘loss’ as well as theft (they were clearly separate and clearly not about loss meaning ‘damaged beyond repair’). I lost my phone while backpacking - I think I left it in a hostel by accident but wasn’t able to say exactly what had happened to it, obviously - and the insurance company wouldn’t pay out because it wasn’t in my possession at the time and had been ‘left unattended’… I mean, that is literally the definition of loss as compared to theft, surely. I didn’t deliberately leave it unattended or I wouldn’t have lost it!

I also am really careful to overvalue compared to what I think it’d really cost to replace when I do home contents insurance after reading about a family who lost say £10k of property in a burglary having been insured for contents of say £50k. Insurance valuer came round and decided that their contents value was actually £90k (based on their little secret sums that they don’t share with anyone…) and therefore as they were only insured for 55% of the value of what they owned, they’d only pay out 55% of the value of what was stolen, despite this being clearly much less than the insured value. I wouldn’t mind so much if they gave clear guidance on this e.g. if your sofa is less than 2 years old, our valuers will say it’s worth £5k even if you only paid £800 for it and would never in a million years ever pay £5k for a sofa, but it sounded like their valuers can just decide how much they think you’d pay for the new sofa you need when your house is damaged by flood or fire or thieves. But, that’s capitalism for you - they’re just out to make as much money as they can. They’d probably end up paying me less because I’ve overvalued it or something (they sure as hell wouldn’t be paying me 20% more than I’d lost because I’d overvalued my contents by 20%!)

What thanks I'll do that. Getting comfortable for a fight

We paid for Apple care for DS's ipad, which is only a few pounds a month. When he completely smashed it by dropping it on tiles 4 weeks later they gave him a brand new one, no questions asked.

I’m actually pretty worried after seeing a Martin Lewis type thing about travel insurance when they said you have to declare as an “pre-existing condition” anything you’ve seen a gp about going back years even if they said it was nothing.

I can’t even remember every inconsequential gp visit I’ve made if it didn’t result in any treatment or diagnosis!

I got an ear infection whilst on holiday in the Caribbean and couldn't fly. Insurance paid for a week of accommodation for me DH and DC, plus new flights home, daily allowance for food, additional parking costs at airport, policy was £98, it ran into thousands! I've never taken it for granted since

I also think its part of the terms you agree to when you buy holiday, that you will take out insurance. We always just get a cheap one

My father-in-law had a compound break falling down some stairs in Portugal, the cost of medical transfer and air ambulance was astronomical even 33 years ago it was in the tens of thousands. Imagine not being insured for that.

We're off to the Carribbean soon and the insurance is nearly as much as the holiday unless we don't want cover for some or all conditions which we are considering.

Screen protector

Prevention is better than a cure.

The point of insurance is to pay for anything that you couldn’t simply pay to replace if it was destroyed or broken to be rendered useless.

So home insurance is vital because if my house was to burn down I don’t have £350k in the bank to buy a new one. Ditto travel insurance if I was hit by a bus in NYC, the medical bills would cripple you if the bus didn’t. But I don’t see the point in paying for insurance for white goods or cancelled tickets because I could take the hit or buy a new one.

Our insurance didn't cover our fire because it was arson. We argued that and they agreed they would cover arson... then the report said the damage to our property was caused by water from the fire brigade rather than the fire itself, and they wouldn't cover that.

Insurance is an absolute waste of money unfortunately.