A Time of Magic

We’re in the midst of a claim for the house insurance and finding that the policy might not be quite so good as we thought it was.

One of the issues we have is that they’ve hiked the excess ten-fold. Yes, it’s ten times what it was a year earlier. Net effect of that is that we find that we’re paying quite a significant chunk of the cost of the repairs ourselves and it’s not quite settled yet either. It’s that bad that in our last chat with them I was very close to telling them to just cancel the policy.

Whilst I’ve not, yet, cancelled it, I am definitely looking into an alternative home insurance quote at the moment. This time I’ll be taking a close read of the small print for sure.

Although there have been closures and mergers of insurance companies all over the place during the last couple of years, that hasn’t stopped some of the specialist insurance companies.

Slightly complicated is that the specialists tend to use all kinds of original (read un-necessarily complex) names like extended service plan and whatnot. That said, they can often offer excellent value in their niche of the insurance market when generalist companies are often offering totally over the top prices along with all kinds of peculiar obstacles for what are, to them, non-standard policies.

As you get older, you’d expect your life insurance to cost more, wouldn’t you? After all, you’re going to die sometime and that time is bound to be getting closer.

Funnily enough, that’s not necessarily the case and for various reasons senior life insurance can be cheaper than normal insurance used for older people. The reason for this is down to complicated statistical effects that are far from obvious. Clearly we all know that the chances of dying are very high in infants thus there’s a major distortion in life expectancy from that angle. Thus, for example, the low average life expectancy in, say, some African countries doesn’t mean that once you clear your teens you’re only going to live to 50 or something: it’s very much skewed towards the young dying in large numbers.

Similarly, as you get towards the upper end of the age range, the older you are, the more likely you are to live a bit longer. Why this should be so is basically down to a whole raft of reasons: you’ve obviously passed the various childhood illnesses, you’re unlikely to be bungy jumping, and, less obviously, you’ve an element of luck (eg through not getting knocked down as you’ve crossed the road over the years).

Add that all up and you’ll generally find that getting a policy aimed at older people will usually be cheaper than continuing to use a normal policy as you get older.