Having insurance is a wise or smarter choice by mean of which you safeguard yourself, your loved ones and your valuable assets. But when it comes to claiming the same, insureds usually frown upon. It sounds more than a headache as it is time consuming and moreover, insurance companies keep procrastinating the clearing. The most critical moment of the entire insurance tenure is when the claim is filed. Insurance company gets flooded with numerous queries and the most common of all is whether the insurance company will honor their claim in a particular situation. Below are some troublesome situations for insured while making the claims:
1) Claims do carry expiry date
Surprisingly, like any other products insurance claims carry expiry date. Unfortunately, there is no fixed time to submit the claim. Quite often and strongly observed that insurer withholds stale claims and refuses to pay or reimburse. One should submit the claims timely to get paid off.
2) Annoying documentation
Insufficient documents add on to the headache while making the claim. It is not easy to simply enter in the claim department and ask for your money. Exhaustive documentation may turn out to be an annoying process but insurer doesn’t process your claim without proper and adequate documents.
3) Ignorance about the coverage
Quite often, insureds file the claim without knowing the coverage of the pertaining policy. Claim for the coverage which a policy doesn’t hold, simply gets rejected. It becomes very irritating and frustrating for insureds in such cases. Hence, insureds need to understand their policy right from the terms and conditions till the coverage in detail. However, there are some points which are not available in online information neither told by the agent. In such cases potential insureds should get the details from existing customers and do their own research.
4) Deductible funda
Deductible is the amount you pay out of your pocket in case of an accident. Lower the deductible, higher will be your premium. If you don’t specify your deductible amount, insurance company will make you pay the standard low deductible. This seems like a favor from insurer but this is a trick which most of the insurers follow.
5) Lack of Police report
As far as auto insurance is concerned, insureds hesitate to file police report in case of an accident. Police should be reported about the accident, no matter how minor the accident is. This minimizes the problems in later proceedings. Sometimes, the other driver can file claims for significant damages than actually suffered; in some cases may also file a personal injury claim. To avoid this, police report should be filed to wipe out the troubles in claiming process.
Concluding, insurance claiming process is a critical and time consuming one but insureds should deeply understand above common errors faced while claiming the insurance and should follow below points; everything else will be taken care of:
1) Insured should disclose all the facts while taking the insurance or filling up the proposal form in order to erase the problems in the claiming process.
2) Careful reading of terms and conditions especially claim process should be done. Claim is a time bound process. One must understand & remember the same while filing the claim.
3) Insured must thoroughly go through the list of documents required for claim process while buying the insurance policy.
4) Going through all the inclusions and exclusions of the policy must be done. This way policy holder will get a clear idea what cover the policy holds.