10 ms·

Insurance is such a scam. A friend of mine made two claims within about five years: once for water damage and once for a burglary. The insurance company agree

Insurance is such a scam. A friend of mine made two claims within about five years: once for water damage and once for a burglary. The insurance company agreed that she was covered. So they paid her and then dropped her. No big deal, right? Wrong. Once you've made a claim or two against your insurance, it can be very hard to get any new insurance company to cover you. She finally did find a new insurer, but the price has gone way up -- negating her original claims. Did you know every claim you make goes into a CLUE report? It's like a credit report, but few people know about it. Once you make "too many claims" - even if they're legit and beyond your control, you become an insurance pariah. Because of this, I avoid making any claims unless absolutely required.

rdtsc 11y ago
Wonder how they share this information. Is it a private database service they are all subscribed to?
- nostromo 11y ago
  I just edited my comment to add that. It's called a CLUE report. Every claim you make goes into your report and it's shared amongst all insurers. https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs26-CLUE.htm https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs26-CLUE.htm
  - rdtsc 11y ago
    Thanks. This explains a lot of things I heard related to claims that I have wondered about in the past.
chimeracoder 11y ago
> She finally did find a new insurer, but the price has gone way up -- negating her original claims. This isn't a scam at all. That's exactly what you'd expect from insurance. Insurance isn't there to save you money. In fact, the expected value of an insurance plan is always going to be negative on an infinite time horizon[0]. The whole point of an insurance plan is to smooth risk: instead of the small possibility of a catastrophic failure, you take the relative certainty of having a fixed monthly payment (your premium). At a very high level, it's sort of similar to taking on consumer debt (credit card debt): in the long run, you'll always pay more than if you just paid cash up-front, because of the interest. The difference between credit cards and insurance is that you don't know when the expensive event is going to happen, so you agree to always pay the monthly payment regardless of what happens. And while banks charge interest based on the risk that you won't pay back and the opportunity cost of that money, insurers charge you a premium in exchange for the luxury of not having to guess whether next month will have an expensive event or not. In your friend's case, the fact that she had two claims adjusted her relative risk profile, which means that her premium had to adjust accordingly. [0] If it weren't, there'd be no point to going into business as an insurer, because you'd be guaranteed to make an operating loss. The only way you'd be able to make any money is based on the investments that you make, at which point you might as well eliminate the insurance side of your business and operate as a bank. (Interestingly, this is why the relationships between banks and insurers are so close in many countries, and also why most insurance markets - car insurance and health insurance[1] being two notable exceptions - have surprisingly slim profit margins). [1] Health insurance is a special case because, strictly speaking, it's not really "insurance", but that's a whole separate discussion.
- deciplex 11y ago
  So if they're adjusting premiums such that they're net positive on every single account, does that mean they'll refund your money if you end the contract without ever having made a claim?
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > So if they're adjusting premiums such that they're net positive on every single account, does that mean they'll refund your money if you end the contract without ever having made a claim? No, because you're paying for the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your worst-case scenario has been mitigated, on the off-chance it happens. Even if there is no disaster, you still benefited from not having to worry about it as much (knowing that the insurer would cover some portion of it). Let's play a game: you're allowed to flip a coin ten times, and I will pay you $1 for each time it comes up heads[0]. Your expected value is $5, but you could make as much as $10 or as little as $0. Someone else comes up to you and offers to pay you a guaranteed minimum of $2 at the end of the game. In exchange, you have to pay him $.25 every time you flip the coin, regardless of whether it comes up heads or tails. In expectation, you're going to come out behind, but this game tightens the variance on your outcome. The worst case is that you lose $.50 (you pay the insurer ten quarters, flip ten tails, and receive $2 from the insurer). The best case is that you receive $7.50 (you pay the insurer ten quarters, flip ten heads, and receive $10 from me). The expected outcome is lower, but the range of possible outcomes is $8, not $10. In the real world, you're insuring against money being taken from you, but mathematically it's the same, and I find it's easier to explain it this way. Most people have a more intuitive sense of earning money than losing it. Go figure - psychology is weird. [0] One notable difference here is that the distribution of coin flips is approximately normal (binomial), whereas most insured events have a very long tail, with a mode of 0.
    - deciplex 11y ago
      I understand how insurance works, but you haven't really addressed what I'm talking about, which is that insurance companies often don't seem to understand how insurance works. You can't expect to make a profit off of every account - it defeats the purpose of an insurance scheme altogether. If an insurance company raises the premiums on a person after they make a claim, or drops them from coverage, even when the nature of that claim does not raise their risk profile, then they're doing it wrong.
vermontdevil 11y ago
No shit. What's the point of buying insurance then? I had septic tank back flow into my basement due to a design defect that was put in PRIOR to my purchase of the house. Insurance paid up then dropped me. Second insurance doubled the premium stating I'm a high risk. I was like WTF? This was a design defect that has been fixed. It's not like I'm a slob and let the house fall apart. It's a relatively new house. What's even dumber is the 'claim' followed me to two more houses over the next eight years. WHY? It's not like I have a magic wand and caused the pipes to bend and cause another back flow. I argued with the current insurance company as high as I could until they agreed to reduce the premium to a level I'm comfortable with. It sucks.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- canow 11y ago
  Health insurance is somewhat the same too... Hospitals and Dentists have special rates for insured patients (much higher)... you can end up paying the same as an uninsured patient... Which is why I was getting hospitalization-only insurance, but with Obama-care, I can't do that anymore. Also, I have been told that it might be illegal to claim that you are uninsured, pay the bill and then get reimbursed by your insurance company to avoid surcharges... not sure if that is true.
  - chimeracoder 11y ago
    > Health insurance is somewhat the same too... Hospitals and Dentists have special rates for insured patients (much higher)... you can end up paying the same as an uninsured patient... Health insurance is actually very different[0]. The flow of money with medical billing is really, really complicated, which is why we end up with a system that's so confusing that even most physicians and clinicians don't really understand it. Hospitals are generally not legally allowed to have higher rates for insured patients; this is actually why the sticker price for uninsured patients is so high. Hospitals use those high prices as a starting point to negotiate lower prices with insurers. (As an uninsured patient, you can almost always get the hospital to knock off 90% of a large bill for this reason; they really don't care what you pay, and they'd rather negotiate a smaller bill with you than have you default). I could go on a long rant about the indirection of the medical billing system and all the problems it leads to, but I'll save that for another time. > Also, I have been told that it might be illegal to claim that you are uninsured, pay the bill and then get reimbursed by your insurance company to avoid surcharges... not sure if that is true. Yes, this is fraud. (It also happens to be a pretty bad example of fraud, since it's probably going to end up costing you more money, but it's still fraud). [0] Strictly speaking, health insurance isn't really 'insurance', even though we talk about it and price it like it is, because one of the primary functions has nothing to do with smoothing risk.
fiatmoney 11y ago
"Because of this, I avoid making any claims unless absolutely required." This is economically efficient behavior - and in fact you should set your deductible to the highest amount you can afford out-of-pocket, as insurance is really only efficient for amounts above that. You should be aiming towards insuring catastrophic loss - eg, a fire that burns your whole house down.
- cortesoft 11y ago
  Yes, self insurance is always better if possible, since that means your cost is exactly equal to your risk. When you buy third party insurance, your cost is going to equal your risk + profit + overhead for the insurance company. You self insure when you can afford the max cost you could incur (e.g. You could buy a new car if you had to.) You buy insurance when you can't afford the rare but very costly catastrophic loss - life insurance, health insurance, car injury insurance.
  - tajen 11y ago
    When renting a car, I don't usually take the insurance to reduce the excess from $5,000 to $0. However, I wonder whether rental companies are then keener to take note of a little scratch, especially when it was preexisting but gone unnoticed at initial inspection.
    - g8gggu89 11y ago
      Not in my limited experience. I was surprised how little the guy seemed to check when I dropped the car off.
      - jweather 11y ago
        Depends on the area. Renting in midwest suburbs, they pointed out and wrote down every tiny scratch in a walkaround before I picked up the car. Renting in New Jersey, the car looked like it had been beaten with a baseball bat, they didn't mark anything down on the damage report.
    - 11y ago
deciplex 11y ago
Insurance has got to be the best business to be in. In what other industry is the business model "take people's money and don't do shit"? Plus, in a lot of domains people are required, by law, to get insurance. It's great.
- avn2109 11y ago
  >> "Plus, in a lot of domains people are required, by law, to get insurance." It's almost like the insurance industry is large, wealthy, and politically well-connected enough to capture regulatory bodies in order to insure the existence of markets for its produc... wait a second...
- ams6110 11y ago
  take people's money and don't do shit That's not what they do, though. They are in business to make money, yes -- but they don't always. A bad hurricane season and they can (and do) lose billions.
  - jandrese 11y ago
    Yeah, it costs a lot to hire inspectors to go out to every property and determine that it was the water in the air, not the wind itself that destroyed the house so they aren't covered.
    - patio11 11y ago
      Cynical and false. http://www.iii.org/sites/default/files/paper_HurricaneAndrew_final.pdf http://www.iii.org/sites/default/files/paper_HurricaneAndrew... Katrina: $47.6 billion paid out. Andrew: $25.0 billion paid out. Ike: $13.1 billion paid out. (Constant 2011 dollars.) See discussion of "wind pool" in the document, by the way: the way Florida works is by having a semi-governmental organization insure wind damage and letting private insurance companies sell "we'll insure any risk as long as it isn't wind damage" policies.
- Cthulhu_ 11y ago
  The requirement by law is fair. If you drive your car into someone else's, you or your insurance company should pay for the damage - the case where the victim gets nothing is thereby avoided. In theory anyway.
Spooky23 11y ago
The bigger scam is that getting the insurance claim denied will probably still either raise his rates or drop him altogether. This is a pretty extreme case of a household hazmat issue. 99/100 times, the pragmatic answer is to maintain deniability, make it as safe as possible and get out if necessary.
- pdabbadabba 11y ago
  > ...the pragmatic answer is to maintain deniability, make it as safe as possible and get out if necessary. Seriously? Pragmatic, yes. But am I reading you correctly? It sounds like your suggestion is to simply sell the house to someone without telling them about the mercury, exposing them to danger, and then prepare to lie about knowing it was there if they do discover it (hopefully not the hard way) and come after you. I mean, nice to make it "as safe as possible," I guess, but you still seem prepared to expose people to conditions that are, nonetheless, totally unsafe in order to get out of paying to fix the problem. (Not to mention the fact that now they have to pay to fix the problem.)
  - jjoonathan 11y ago
    In other words, you agree completely. Grandparent never said that following the pragmatic path in this case would be morally defensible and almost certainly believes that it wouldn't be (except in the sense that the human capacity for rationalization is nearly infinite and so a person stuck in the situation would likely manage to convince themselves otherwise). I get the sense that the grandparent post was complaining that by allowing insurance companies to exclude events like this we've created a terrible moral hazard.
  - jandrese 11y ago
    It's a tough choice between being a scumbag and paying two years salary[1] out of pocket for something that was not your fault and that the insurance apparently doesn't cover because they are scumbags too. [1] The median wage in the US per person is $26,695.
    - 11y ago
noonespecial 11y ago
Basically, thanks to CLUE, you only really get to use insurance once. Take this into account when thinking about your premiums and any claim you consider making. Insurance is for the big fire that takes it all. Also (in my experience), hire a lawyer who's wise in the ways of insurance weasel-speak to shepherd your claim. They're worth more than their fee in additional payout. Lastly, always investigate how hard it will be to get insurance on a property you are considering buying. Water and/or mold damage claims typically remain against a property in the CLUE indefinitely.
Ntrails 11y ago
Insurance isn't a scam, but market forces have caused what you describe. If the insurer offers an "even" price to all people regardless of history, then it will lose business to a company that offers "No claims discounts". Therefore all of it's customers would he high risk driving prices up even further. Essentially unless you are willing to outlaw all risk assessment and premium scaling you cannot prevent exactly what you describe. Note that the EU did this with regards to gender discrimination on car insurance premiums (insurers have simply found proxy variables which correlate highly to gender).
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
Insurances can be done fairly though. Take car insurance (where I live); if you drive accident-free, no problem, you get a discount that grows every year (up to 70%, depending on the company). Get into an accident that wasn't your fault? No problem, the other party's insurance (which is mandatory) will pay. Get into an accident that was your fault (like I did :( ), your no-claim discount will drop because you f'd up. My insurance doubled. This was a €900 bill though, so doing the maths, that's 9 years worth of no-claim discount (as in, I'd have to drive accident-free for 9 years with the same policy before I would earn the not-claiming-insurance back). Of course, that's based on a motorcycle insurance, which is half as expensive as a car insurance; if I get a car insurance later, that discount (or lack thereof) will persist. TL;DR: I have no problems with insurances becoming more expensive for people that make or get claims for things that were their fault.
barking 11y ago
You don't need insurance or a burglary, you need insurance for a disaster that is unlikely to ever happen such as the building burning down. And having a mindset like this means you can get insurance cheaper by having exclusions and a high excess.
criddell 11y ago
How do I access my CLUE report? My house insurance company recently sent me their updated privacy notice and I'll have to reread it. I don't remember them saying they would share my claim history with third parties.

rdtsc 11y ago

Wonder how they share this information. Is it a private database service they are all subscribed to?

nostromo 11y ago
I just edited my comment to add that. It's called a CLUE report. Every claim you make goes into your report and it's shared amongst all insurers. https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs26-CLUE.htm https://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs26-CLUE.htm
- rdtsc 11y ago
  Thanks. This explains a lot of things I heard related to claims that I have wondered about in the past.

chimeracoder 11y ago

> She finally did find a new insurer, but the price has gone way up -- negating her original claims. This isn't a scam at all. That's exactly what you'd expect from insurance. Insurance isn't there to save you money. In fact, the expected value of an insurance plan is always going to be negative on an infinite time horizon[0]. The whole point of an insurance plan is to smooth risk: instead of the small possibility of a catastrophic failure, you take the relative certainty of having a fixed monthly payment (your premium). At a very high level, it's sort of similar to taking on consumer debt (credit card debt): in the long run, you'll always pay more than if you just paid cash up-front, because of the interest. The difference between credit cards and insurance is that you don't know when the expensive event is going to happen, so you agree to always pay the monthly payment regardless of what happens. And while banks charge interest based on the risk that you won't pay back and the opportunity cost of that money, insurers charge you a premium in exchange for the luxury of not having to guess whether next month will have an expensive event or not. In your friend's case, the fact that she had two claims adjusted her relative risk profile, which means that her premium had to adjust accordingly. [0] If it weren't, there'd be no point to going into business as an insurer, because you'd be guaranteed to make an operating loss. The only way you'd be able to make any money is based on the investments that you make, at which point you might as well eliminate the insurance side of your business and operate as a bank. (Interestingly, this is why the relationships between banks and insurers are so close in many countries, and also why most insurance markets - car insurance and health insurance[1] being two notable exceptions - have surprisingly slim profit margins). [1] Health insurance is a special case because, strictly speaking, it's not really "insurance", but that's a whole separate discussion.

deciplex 11y ago
So if they're adjusting premiums such that they're net positive on every single account, does that mean they'll refund your money if you end the contract without ever having made a claim?
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > So if they're adjusting premiums such that they're net positive on every single account, does that mean they'll refund your money if you end the contract without ever having made a claim? No, because you're paying for the peace of mind that comes with knowing that your worst-case scenario has been mitigated, on the off-chance it happens. Even if there is no disaster, you still benefited from not having to worry about it as much (knowing that the insurer would cover some portion of it). Let's play a game: you're allowed to flip a coin ten times, and I will pay you $1 for each time it comes up heads[0]. Your expected value is $5, but you could make as much as $10 or as little as $0. Someone else comes up to you and offers to pay you a guaranteed minimum of $2 at the end of the game. In exchange, you have to pay him $.25 every time you flip the coin, regardless of whether it comes up heads or tails. In expectation, you're going to come out behind, but this game tightens the variance on your outcome. The worst case is that you lose $.50 (you pay the insurer ten quarters, flip ten tails, and receive $2 from the insurer). The best case is that you receive $7.50 (you pay the insurer ten quarters, flip ten heads, and receive $10 from me). The expected outcome is lower, but the range of possible outcomes is $8, not $10. In the real world, you're insuring against money being taken from you, but mathematically it's the same, and I find it's easier to explain it this way. Most people have a more intuitive sense of earning money than losing it. Go figure - psychology is weird. [0] One notable difference here is that the distribution of coin flips is approximately normal (binomial), whereas most insured events have a very long tail, with a mode of 0.
  - deciplex 11y ago
    I understand how insurance works, but you haven't really addressed what I'm talking about, which is that insurance companies often don't seem to understand how insurance works. You can't expect to make a profit off of every account - it defeats the purpose of an insurance scheme altogether. If an insurance company raises the premiums on a person after they make a claim, or drops them from coverage, even when the nature of that claim does not raise their risk profile, then they're doing it wrong.

vermontdevil 11y ago

No shit. What's the point of buying insurance then? I had septic tank back flow into my basement due to a design defect that was put in PRIOR to my purchase of the house. Insurance paid up then dropped me. Second insurance doubled the premium stating I'm a high risk. I was like WTF? This was a design defect that has been fixed. It's not like I'm a slob and let the house fall apart. It's a relatively new house. What's even dumber is the 'claim' followed me to two more houses over the next eight years. WHY? It's not like I have a magic wand and caused the pipes to bend and cause another back flow. I argued with the current insurance company as high as I could until they agreed to reduce the premium to a level I'm comfortable with. It sucks.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
canow 11y ago
Health insurance is somewhat the same too... Hospitals and Dentists have special rates for insured patients (much higher)... you can end up paying the same as an uninsured patient... Which is why I was getting hospitalization-only insurance, but with Obama-care, I can't do that anymore. Also, I have been told that it might be illegal to claim that you are uninsured, pay the bill and then get reimbursed by your insurance company to avoid surcharges... not sure if that is true.
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > Health insurance is somewhat the same too... Hospitals and Dentists have special rates for insured patients (much higher)... you can end up paying the same as an uninsured patient... Health insurance is actually very different[0]. The flow of money with medical billing is really, really complicated, which is why we end up with a system that's so confusing that even most physicians and clinicians don't really understand it. Hospitals are generally not legally allowed to have higher rates for insured patients; this is actually why the sticker price for uninsured patients is so high. Hospitals use those high prices as a starting point to negotiate lower prices with insurers. (As an uninsured patient, you can almost always get the hospital to knock off 90% of a large bill for this reason; they really don't care what you pay, and they'd rather negotiate a smaller bill with you than have you default). I could go on a long rant about the indirection of the medical billing system and all the problems it leads to, but I'll save that for another time. > Also, I have been told that it might be illegal to claim that you are uninsured, pay the bill and then get reimbursed by your insurance company to avoid surcharges... not sure if that is true. Yes, this is fraud. (It also happens to be a pretty bad example of fraud, since it's probably going to end up costing you more money, but it's still fraud). [0] Strictly speaking, health insurance isn't really 'insurance', even though we talk about it and price it like it is, because one of the primary functions has nothing to do with smoothing risk.

fiatmoney 11y ago

"Because of this, I avoid making any claims unless absolutely required." This is economically efficient behavior - and in fact you should set your deductible to the highest amount you can afford out-of-pocket, as insurance is really only efficient for amounts above that. You should be aiming towards insuring catastrophic loss - eg, a fire that burns your whole house down.

cortesoft 11y ago
Yes, self insurance is always better if possible, since that means your cost is exactly equal to your risk. When you buy third party insurance, your cost is going to equal your risk + profit + overhead for the insurance company. You self insure when you can afford the max cost you could incur (e.g. You could buy a new car if you had to.) You buy insurance when you can't afford the rare but very costly catastrophic loss - life insurance, health insurance, car injury insurance.
- tajen 11y ago
  When renting a car, I don't usually take the insurance to reduce the excess from $5,000 to $0. However, I wonder whether rental companies are then keener to take note of a little scratch, especially when it was preexisting but gone unnoticed at initial inspection.
  - g8gggu89 11y ago
    Not in my limited experience. I was surprised how little the guy seemed to check when I dropped the car off.
    - jweather 11y ago
      Depends on the area. Renting in midwest suburbs, they pointed out and wrote down every tiny scratch in a walkaround before I picked up the car. Renting in New Jersey, the car looked like it had been beaten with a baseball bat, they didn't mark anything down on the damage report.
  - 11y ago

deciplex 11y ago

Insurance has got to be the best business to be in. In what other industry is the business model "take people's money and don't do shit"? Plus, in a lot of domains people are required, by law, to get insurance. It's great.

avn2109 11y ago
>> "Plus, in a lot of domains people are required, by law, to get insurance." It's almost like the insurance industry is large, wealthy, and politically well-connected enough to capture regulatory bodies in order to insure the existence of markets for its produc... wait a second...
ams6110 11y ago
take people's money and don't do shit That's not what they do, though. They are in business to make money, yes -- but they don't always. A bad hurricane season and they can (and do) lose billions.
- jandrese 11y ago
  Yeah, it costs a lot to hire inspectors to go out to every property and determine that it was the water in the air, not the wind itself that destroyed the house so they aren't covered.
  - patio11 11y ago
    Cynical and false. http://www.iii.org/sites/default/files/paper_HurricaneAndrew_final.pdf http://www.iii.org/sites/default/files/paper_HurricaneAndrew... Katrina: $47.6 billion paid out. Andrew: $25.0 billion paid out. Ike: $13.1 billion paid out. (Constant 2011 dollars.) See discussion of "wind pool" in the document, by the way: the way Florida works is by having a semi-governmental organization insure wind damage and letting private insurance companies sell "we'll insure any risk as long as it isn't wind damage" policies.
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
The requirement by law is fair. If you drive your car into someone else's, you or your insurance company should pay for the damage - the case where the victim gets nothing is thereby avoided. In theory anyway.

Spooky23 11y ago

The bigger scam is that getting the insurance claim denied will probably still either raise his rates or drop him altogether. This is a pretty extreme case of a household hazmat issue. 99/100 times, the pragmatic answer is to maintain deniability, make it as safe as possible and get out if necessary.

pdabbadabba 11y ago
> ...the pragmatic answer is to maintain deniability, make it as safe as possible and get out if necessary. Seriously? Pragmatic, yes. But am I reading you correctly? It sounds like your suggestion is to simply sell the house to someone without telling them about the mercury, exposing them to danger, and then prepare to lie about knowing it was there if they do discover it (hopefully not the hard way) and come after you. I mean, nice to make it "as safe as possible," I guess, but you still seem prepared to expose people to conditions that are, nonetheless, totally unsafe in order to get out of paying to fix the problem. (Not to mention the fact that now they have to pay to fix the problem.)
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  In other words, you agree completely. Grandparent never said that following the pragmatic path in this case would be morally defensible and almost certainly believes that it wouldn't be (except in the sense that the human capacity for rationalization is nearly infinite and so a person stuck in the situation would likely manage to convince themselves otherwise). I get the sense that the grandparent post was complaining that by allowing insurance companies to exclude events like this we've created a terrible moral hazard.
- jandrese 11y ago
  It's a tough choice between being a scumbag and paying two years salary[1] out of pocket for something that was not your fault and that the insurance apparently doesn't cover because they are scumbags too. [1] The median wage in the US per person is $26,695.
  - 11y ago

noonespecial 11y ago

Basically, thanks to CLUE, you only really get to use insurance once. Take this into account when thinking about your premiums and any claim you consider making. Insurance is for the big fire that takes it all. Also (in my experience), hire a lawyer who's wise in the ways of insurance weasel-speak to shepherd your claim. They're worth more than their fee in additional payout. Lastly, always investigate how hard it will be to get insurance on a property you are considering buying. Water and/or mold damage claims typically remain against a property in the CLUE indefinitely.

Ntrails 11y ago

Insurance isn't a scam, but market forces have caused what you describe. If the insurer offers an "even" price to all people regardless of history, then it will lose business to a company that offers "No claims discounts". Therefore all of it's customers would he high risk driving prices up even further. Essentially unless you are willing to outlaw all risk assessment and premium scaling you cannot prevent exactly what you describe. Note that the EU did this with regards to gender discrimination on car insurance premiums (insurers have simply found proxy variables which correlate highly to gender).

Cthulhu_ 11y ago

Insurances can be done fairly though. Take car insurance (where I live); if you drive accident-free, no problem, you get a discount that grows every year (up to 70%, depending on the company). Get into an accident that wasn't your fault? No problem, the other party's insurance (which is mandatory) will pay. Get into an accident that was your fault (like I did :( ), your no-claim discount will drop because you f'd up. My insurance doubled. This was a €900 bill though, so doing the maths, that's 9 years worth of no-claim discount (as in, I'd have to drive accident-free for 9 years with the same policy before I would earn the not-claiming-insurance back). Of course, that's based on a motorcycle insurance, which is half as expensive as a car insurance; if I get a car insurance later, that discount (or lack thereof) will persist. TL;DR: I have no problems with insurances becoming more expensive for people that make or get claims for things that were their fault.

barking 11y ago

You don't need insurance or a burglary, you need insurance for a disaster that is unlikely to ever happen such as the building burning down. And having a mindset like this means you can get insurance cheaper by having exclusions and a high excess.

criddell 11y ago

How do I access my CLUE report? My house insurance company recently sent me their updated privacy notice and I'll have to reread it. I don't remember them saying they would share my claim history with third parties.