A Book Recommendation for Parents

... Learn about insurance details before a crisis

This is a great and useful book,

Here’s the (not affiliate, though I guess I should set it up for books, link),

https://www.amazon.com/Delay-Deny-Defend-insurance-companies-ebook/dp/B086Z2HGWM

I learned about it through recent news, but the topic has long been on my mind to share. It’s good to know before you encounter a problem with your own home, car, or health. Just so the knowledge is in the back of your mind.

Even simple mistakes can trip you up. For example, when I priced homeowner’s insurance, the insurance agent for State Farm pushed me to include our two sheds in the policy. When I drilled into the details, the coverage for the sheds was greater than the cost of the sheds. This is technically illegal — I forget the term, but it’s an inducement to commit fraud, so policies aren’t supposed to be structured like that (you can see how it helps sell policies!)

What the aggressive agent did not disclose up front was that the insurer would cancel my policy either before or after the second claim, so I would have paid massive premiums on my whole property, but it was very likely that a claim on one of the two cheap sheds would have acted to cancel the policy. Once your policy is canceled in such a way, it is very difficult and expensive to get another with a different company, perhaps impossible, and the original insurer will not give you another policy.

If you have a mortgage, you are required to buy a policy to cover the house. If there is damage, the bank will get repaid.

This is only a small example. I did not buy the policy, but I did wrench all these little details out of the guy as I shopped.

Oh, by the way, policies covering your house now specifically exclude mold, and major insurers will not write a policy rider to cover mold. Do you know what that means? It means a problem is so large, so common, and so expensive that the insurer cannot price it properly to make a profit selling it. Remember that when you look at healthcare.

For example, before you get any dental procedure, check to see what your healthcare insurer covers for remediation. A good test case is dental implants. See how many dental implant removals the insurer covers. You will find that it is none or one. This means the problem is the same as the mold coverage issue.

No one makes money by warning you away from products, but you can find much information tucked into such things as the wording of insurance policies, the pharmaceutical details given to doctors (not patients), lawsuits, etc.

Now you need a break from the dire. Check out my sailboat gift story for some happy imagery.