insurance

this morning i rec'd my reneual docs for my house contents insurance from direct line. i was reading though the bumpf at work and it occured to me that i ought to up the cover - so i rang them up.

Once we'd been through hifi/cd/records/and stuff they wanted to double it. i live on london so i've learnt to take these kind of costs on the chin. But they wanted me to install a burglar alarm within 14 days. i work in a related business so it's not a big deal, but 14 days i thought was a bit strong.

i managed to stretch them to 21 days with the lets do a role play conversation- let's imagine just for one moment that I'm your customer.

any one else been through this?

 

My experience (with Zurich) has been a little different. i wanted to have my HiFi adequately insured but was told that as long as individual items of hardware were below £5k there was no need to insure them separately. I don't think the guy understood the concept of HiFi. I just hope that I never need to make a claim. I just don't feel that confident that my HiFi is covered.

I do have an intruder alarm fitted and maintained.

 

maybe your contents value was higher and mine was just too low.

i don't think apart from the short peroid to fit an alarm DL where unreasonable but they gave me the impression that they thought i was up to no good , so to speak. i'm still glad i made the cal.l though records/cd's and hifi cost me 30 quid a month to insure. that's crazy

 

I must admit that my Insurance company (AXA) couldn't be more helpful, they've replaced two cartridges without quibble and and a SME 3009 with a M2-9 all on accidental damage claims, they have independant companies who arrange the replacments and it all happens very quickly.

David
PS I live in London and my premiums are a lot less than yours

 

maybe i should up it to include the accident thing, especially with a 2.5 YO in the house

 

As far as Zurich is concerned, as long as they were bought as an individual item (priced individually, even if on the same receipt) you should be all right.

 

i think DL are ok too. the key is having the right amount of cover in the first place and perhaps not the cheap bundle they sell you first off. if you are inadequaltly insured they will reduce a claim by the same proportion. god, there's me sticking up for them again.

 

An excellent Topic. I think i'll have to get my policy documents out to check . I'm with Norwich Union and they replaced my Shure V15VxMR earlier on this year, via a third party, no problem ( minus £60 excess).

 

i think they thing here is that if there it is a claim below a certain threshold they'll probably pay it as the costs associated with questioning it would be a significant proportion of the claim itself. if the claim is considerable then the full loss adjuster treatment goes into action and the whole sum insured becomes a factor.

I've had contents insurance for only the last 7/8 years and for most of that , following the conversations I had with DL, I have been inadeqautly insured. so it's probably worth a look at that policy.

for example typical contents value is set at around 30K , so taking say a rrp 10K hifi, 1000 cd's another 10 K and 2000 records another maybe 15K (even if you could replace them) means that there's not much left for anything else.

one more thing DL offer a 7.5% per cent saving if your burglar alarm is 'serviced and monitored'. the costs asociated with achieving this are high and certainly year on year a lot more than 7.5% of any contents policy. certainly mine and mines high given where we live. aside from the monthly monitoring costs, there is the dedicated telephone line, two visits a year service cost ( these systems don't really need servicing-just buy a new battery for the panel every five years or so) and that for a system to go back to a central station they have to carry certain certification which means that your probably buying it off a larger established company who's overheads are high and so is the price. the service engineer will also be incentivised to find and fix things 'wrong' with the system. This means new batteries very year etc. etc.

there are a companies who offer a deal where the system goes in for nothing and all the revenue is generated through the monitoring via your telephone bill. the system calls the station dailly on a premium number to generate the revenue. you are locked into this system for a very long time and like any low/zero start up cost contract you end up paying throught the nose.

if there is anyone in and around london who ends up having a similar conversation with their insurers and needs a burglar alarm system i do know a reputable mob and would be happy to pass on the details if anybody wants to PM me

 

to add - i think it's too late for this year but my insurance vendor will be reviewed next

 

insurers are the scum of the earth - and I work in the industry. I did some consultancy work once for a motor underwriter in Milton Keynes. their approach was to automatically deny every claim when it was first logged, irrespective of the basis. like that a very high percentage of people simply gave up at that point, when they had a perfectly valid claim.

 

MLC

i'm sure your right - this is how they pay for hurricannes,oil rigs tipping over etc.

a friend of mine once proposed an advert hook for similar businesses

''no one cares more about us than we do''

 

Abbey National are a bit of a pain, when I had to claim for my dead dynavector it took days of explaining to various people in India what a cartridge was then telling them the colour was completely irrelevant and no it didn't have a built in radio or CD etc. etc. Then they wanted to send someone from Dixons round to check it was actually broken but I eventually managed to convince them they were wasting their time and got them to let me take it to the local hifi dealer who wrote a damage report. Many reminder calls later I got them to send the money out. To be fair it was fairly quick over all, 3-4 weeks I think but it was a real pain. Thing is they didn't actually see the cart once, for all they know it could be fine and I just got the guy to write the report- we both benefit from it afterall.
Having to up the contents value to cover it all, its the records that are the real expense though.