Insurance: to buy or not to buy?
by Becky Tappin
Insurance.
Even the mention of the word makes most of us cringe and immediately think about the financial burden it brings with it.
S I ask the question: is insurance really necessary?
Well, I can tell you the answer is yes.
After experiencing first-hand a situation where, without insurance, my family would now be a few thousand dollars worse off, I’m an insurance advocate.
One rainy Sunday morning a few weeks ago I was abruptly woken up by my father when he stormed in to my bedroom. He said there was a problem. He wasn’t kidding. After I begrudingly got out of bed - it was only 10 o’clok, after all - I then witnessed the carnage.
Water, water everywhere
I quickly realised the problem was water, and lots of it.
Inside my room, the laundry, the lounge and the hallway. Our downstairs floor was flooding - and fast. To cut a long story short, the carpet was ruined and needed to be replaced.
Big problem? Not so for the insured family.
Within a day the insurance assessor had been and gone and told us the wet carpet would be removed, the floors cleaned and downstairs would be fully recarpeted. All we had to pay was the $1000 on our policy.
The damage and repair costs were estimated at $9,500, a heck of a lot more than a grand, and all because we were insured.
Simply by paying our premium once a month we saved ourselves a lot of money and hassle - plus we got new carpet, (which my Dad later admitted needed replacing anyway!).
The moral of the story? Insurance will save you money in the long run.
To the naysayers, I’d say it’s ludicrous to expect that nothing will go wrong in your life - accidcents do happen.
Is it worth risking losing everything to save a few pennies? Insurance covers the lot from your home and contents to health, travel and your life.
What about the family in Wellington whose house burnt down and the father was inside? Not only did they lose their father and husband, but they were not insured and lost everything and were relying on donations to set themselves up again. This would have been an unnecessary burden to deal with had they been insured.
Yes, insurnace can be costly, but my mother has always told me that it is better to have something and not need it, than need and not have it. How appropriate, given our recent watery encounter.
Even more appropriate for the guy who reversed into her car over the weekend!