When cheap insurance may not be the best (Youi controversies)
As your financial planner, our goal is to make sure that you have all the financial solutions in place that will help you achieve your goals.  This includes your life, trauma, health and income protection insurance cover.  But as part of our job, we want to ensure that you have fire and general insurance (house, contents, vehicle, boat) in place that will work for you.

Fire and General insurance cover is a specialist area of advice, one that we are not experts in.  We aim to make sure that you have the cover in place and that you have thought through the levels of cover (and that you review that cover regularly.)

As with all the discussions around insurance that we have with our clients, the cheapest may not be the best insurance. With Life/Trauma/Income Protection/Health insurance, our recommendations balance out the cost with the benefits and the claims paying reputation of the insurer.

Personally, we use an independent fire and general insurance broker – Chris Rolfe at Bridges Insurance in Hamilton.  We have worked with Chris and his team for many years and have had fantastic claims experience (and the cost seems extremely reasonable – knowing that we are getting specialist expertise and advice.)

While some of our clients have started working with Bridges, other clients are happily working with AMI, State or other ‘direct to market’ insurers.  However, there has recently been some controversy over a new market entrant Youi, who have been aggressively marketing and advertising.

The point of this blog post is to bring this to your attention, so that you are fully informed in the decisions that you make – you may decide to deal with Youi – but at least you will be aware of some of their practices.

Read more here.

When will your insurance not pay out?

The goal of having insurance is to have it work for you when you need it.  Unfortunately, sometimes insurance companies don’t pay out on a claim on insurance, and this can give the insurance industry a bad name.  As your financial adviser, we work with you to make sure that you declare everything that you are aware of to an insurer when you are completing an insurance application.

The most common reasons that insurance policies don’t pay out when you go to claim are:

1. Non-disclosure.  This is generally when you have not declared a relevant piece of information to the insurer that would have changed their ‘offer’ of insurance to you.  It could be headaches that you received medical advice on, or it could be speeding or drink/driving offences when you apply for car insurance.  This is where working with a specialist insurance adviser should protect you from non disclosure.  We encourage our clients to mention everything, no matter how trivial it seems to you.
2. Suicide.  In many countries insurers never pay out life insurance if the cause of death was suicide.  However, in New Zealand, suicide is covered after a policy is in place for 13 months.  When you move your life insurance company to another insurer, if they have ‘transfer terms’, you should not have to start your 13 month time period again.  However, it is important that the insurer knows that you are moving your policy to them under ‘transfer terms’.  Stuff recently published an article about the impact of suicide on life insurance claims, which you can read below.
3.  Condition not covered by policy. 

Do you have a photographic memory?

I know that having a photographic memory is rare (and valuable), but I did this test with fingers crossed and hopeful. When I am studying I can remember pictures of the mind maps that I have drawn in various colours, so maybe….

But no, I am just good at memorising things and have a good memory. What about you?  Do you have a photographic memory?

Find out if you have a photographic memory quiz [NZ Herald]