How to make insurance simple

In a previous article https://www.dempseyferguson.co.nz/post/how-to-prepare-a-successful-insurance-claim I set out the four basic questions that you need to answer to prepare an insurance claim. These questions have some other useful functions to help you navigate your way through insurance claims.  They are essentially tools to organise your thinking and make information easier to understand.

The questions are:

1.      What is the damage?

2.      How do you fix it?

3.      How much will it cost?

4.      Who pays?

Although at some stage you will have to get the answers to these questions, the questions themselves can be useful to help you understand documents or what insurance people are saying when they call you to talk about your claim.

Significant insurance claims can be quite overwhelming. It's not something that you deal with every day but you find yourself coming into contact with people who appear to have expertise and knowledge that you may not have.  I reckon that there are two types of people in the world: complicators and simplifiers. In every walk of life we come across both complicators and simplifiers.  I have been assisting people with insurance claims and other types of claims against large organisations for about 24 years but I still come across people who make things very complicated to understand. When this happens in an insurance context, I always ask myself which of the four questions does this information fit under?

Quite often I find that when I am confused about what somebody is saying or has written about an insurance claim it is because they are mixing up the answers to the four questions. Often when they are talking about the damage they will include in the same paragraph or even the same sentence how to fix the damage and they may even mention who should pay to fix the damage. When this happens, I sit down and make a list of all of the damage that is identified in the document and then make a separate list of all of the repairs that are identified in the document.