Don’t even talk to me this week about insurance companies.
For far too many years we’ve been paying our premiums for home and contents on our place and have had precisely ZERO claims and now after the big blow we need them.
Can you guess what happened? Well done, but let’s continue.
Monster tree down, not covered for removal because it didn’t impact the house. Maybe fair enough. However, had I not cut it down myself with the help of a kindly neighbour, and the council’s green waste pick up we could have been up for a LOT of money to take it away.
Lost several metres of fencing too, maybe 6 or 7 hundred bucks worth, but here’s the kicker, an excess of $600 that has to be paid, before the work is done!
So I’ve come up with a plan for our insurance company that is “always there to help us.”
Next time the bill comes I would like to send a reciprocal account for the time and effort it will take to pay the premium.
If I am to send correspondence that will require a letter so there should be a charge for the paper, the envelope, the drive to the post office and the cost of the stamp, and depreciation on my printer plus the cost of the ink.
This will have to be done in my personal time because I’d never dream of impinging on work time for such a matter.
I am extremely important and busy so I’ll need to calculate how much that time is worth and the company will be charged accordingly.
Of course online is the easier way, however there will be several lines of expenditure as this also has cost implications to me and therefore the insurance company.
Electricity to run the computer I’ll use, depreciation of the computer itself, internet access is not free, and once again there is the issue of my very valuable time that will be taken up to pay the premium.
I also have expenditure to actually run my office at home so there are another several lines for the account.
This whole exercise has really given my already delicate blood pressure a bump so can you imagine what might happen if I get too stressed and have to have time off!
Now I consider it, perhaps I should include a line of expenditure to cover the hours it took me to pay the premiums over the years, retrospectivity cannot be ruled out.
Yes we will continue with insurance, I’m not stupid, you just never know, but the next time the insurance company wants to talk to me about an excess, I will talk to them about mine.