Annual Insurance Review
Insurance is a grudge purchase which we tend to set and forget. We push it to the back of our mind, diligently pay our premiums and hope that we didn't miss any fine print if we ever need to claim one day.
As our lifestyle changes, it's important to review our insurance so that we aren't under or over insured. As much as we all hate paying those premiums, it's a harder pill to swallow finding out when we claim that we're not as well covered as we thought.
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Insurance drudgery
For most of us, insurance is a grudge purchase. It's something we know we probably need but it's certainly not something to get excited about.
To be honest, dealing with insurance is generally a pain. From car and household insurance through to medical insurance, none of it is hugely exciting. There's fine print, exclusions, premium increases and a host of other boring and confusing things to make sense of.
Once we've gone through the initial pain of getting insured, we typically just forget about it and pay our premiums without much more thought.
The problem with this is that as our lifestyle and circumstances change, we can find ourselves over or under insured. Either we pay too much for things we no longer have or don't care about being insured for, or we end up in trouble when we eventually claim for something and find that we're under insured.
Cleaning up my insurance
Over the last year I've been using my desktop computer less and less. I primarily use my work laptop for just about everything along with my personal laptop for a couple things here and there.
I've had my desktop PC for about 8 years now during which time I've always had it insured. It's still going strong but lately I just haven't had any need for it. I haven't even switched it on in about 6 months.
This week I finally decided to remove it from my insurance for a couple reasons:
- I no longer use it and am unlikely to get another desktop PC.
- I really hate paying for things unnecessarily as it goes against my thrifty nature.
- The money spent paying that premium every month can really add up over time in terms of true cost.
Depreciation
When we're insured for anything where the replacement value depreciates over time, it's worth contacting our insurance company each year to ensure they reduce our premium accordingly.
For example, a car's value depreciates over time which means the value which we initially insure it for is no longer accurate a few years down the line. Ideally our insurance should automatically reduce our premium based on the vehicle's depreciating value over time, however it's worth confirming that this is in fact happening.
The annual review
I like to consider myself as being on top of my finances with a good understanding of our family's cash flow. But finally deciding to remove my desktop PC from our insurance made me realize that insurance is perhaps an area which I need to be better at.
It was completely random that something made me think about my unused PC all of a sudden and the fact that I'm paying a premium every month to insure it. Not sure what made me think of it.
Going forward I'm going to try to review our insurance annually. Insurance is not something I'm naturally going to jump out of bed in the morning excitedly thinking about. So I need to just make a point of reviewing it annually.
Is there anything you've been surprised to find out you're insured for? Anything you completely forgot about only to find out years later that you're still paying a premium to insure?
Article by Brendon @ Money FI